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.

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Keeping track of concepts

In a textbook kind of book, new concepts are introduced to the reader. In a book with hyperlinks, such as an e-book or a book on the web, it is possible to link the introduction of a concept to a table with all concepts in the book, bundled together with explanations, and perhaps also with links to be used for further reading.

In a Book with Views, this can be extended to a per-view handling of the concepts. You can see an example of this, in the introduction of the concepts variable and value in the beginning of the chapter called Names and values in the book Into Programming.

The collection of concepts can also be reached via the book’s About page.