Linking in and out of a book

In a recent article – EXTRA ETHER: eBooks Gone in 5 Years? – brought to my attention in a tweet from Joanna Penn, the possibility of linking in to an e-book was discussed. In a Book with Views, this is possible, not because of the views, but due to the use of a common format, in which the book is written, and which then is used as the base for generating the different book versions – a web version, e-book versions in epub-format and mobi-format, and versions suitable for print – one for each of the views.

It is possible to link in to a book, for example to a chapter, a section, but also to a specific figure, and to pages collecting meta-information, e.g. the page collecting all URLs used in the book.

Of course it is always possible to link out of a book. This helps the reader to probe further, and it has also been pointed out recently by Seth Godin in What do you do when they don’t understand?.

If a common format is used, software can of course help the author, to keep hyperlinks consistent between different book formats, and also to automatically create meta-information, like the page showing all the urls, mentioned above, or to a page listing all concepts defined and used in a book.

Connecting the views

In the drafts of books created so far, there are links inside the books between the views. The links are placed inside the book, at the end of each section. There are also links between the views in the about pages, e.g. on the about page showing the URLs used in a book. In the web versions of the books, there are also links in the sidebar of each page.

Recently I added links between the views directly after figures showing code. As an example of this later feature, you can take a look at Figure 1 in Into Programming, where you can see the links to the other views.

The links works as illustrated in this figure (click the figure to get a larger version), where some text and some code from a program, written in C in one view and written in Java in another view, is shown.

As you can see in the above figure, parts of the text are common for both programs, and other parts of the text are different. The code of course is different, since that is the whole point of having these views, with one view for each programming language!

The connections between the views are shown in the figure as dashed red arrows, corresponding to the hyperlinks you will find inside the book.