There are a lot of different methods for adding a footnote to non-fiction ebooks. None of them are elegant.
Why?
Because most methods require the reader to click on a hyper-linked footnote number, go to the footnote and then press either the back button or another hyperlink to go back to where they were reading.
This totally interrupts their reading experience.
So, when I was formatting an ebook for an Author that had 58 footnotes in his non-fiction ebook, I thought, “There has to be a better way.
It made no sense to me to do the extra work of putting in hyperlinks – one to the footnote and another back to where the person left of reading.
I mean lets get serious, this is the one area where we should not follow the norm of print publishing where footnote(s) can be placed at the bottom of the page.
Helloooooooooooo – there are no pages in ebooks – so footnotes are placed at the end of individual chapters or end of an ebook.
Frankly, this is a bad idea because if you use the hyper-linked end of chapter or ebook method, your reader will see some of them out of context.
Not an elegant solution.
So what is the better way?
I came up with having the footnote be immediately under what was being read like this:
This paragraph is talking about something important and I really want to show I know what I’m talking about so I will reference a book, newpaper article or a magazine article.20
20Judith Tramayne, in her ebook “How to Format a Non-Fiction eBook” June 2012.
And then you would continue on with what you’re writing. By doing it this way your reader does not have to take time away from their reading.
Now the code is done in your .html file and your style.css file. The code is below.
