> Imagine reading a book, and after a mention of a famous Italian structure, press on the name and have a Wikipedia description of its history appear, with an image.
I'm a great believer in ebooks. However, this is one feature I don't want. It's a distraction, it pulls me away from my book and I end up on a Wikipedia binge instead of finishing what I set out to do. It's not good for my attention span.
There are some novels (Gravity's Rainbow comes to mind) where I frequently had to look up various events and people that were mentioned in the text. I can see this being helpful, but I'd probably prefer an "annotated edition" where you could view notes written specifically for the book you were reading instead of generic Wikipedia links.
Unfortunately I haven't encountered any ebooks that handle annotations in a pleasant way that takes advantage of the technology. The few I've seen that had annotations just had hyperlinks to a different page in the ebook, which makes you lose the context. With ebooks, endnotes like these seem absurd to me; the annotation should be viewable inline on the original page.
The blog article doesn't mention it, but I've found that the footnotes have to be in the same XHTML file as the reference for this to work in iBooks. Also, iBooks for OSX doesn't display these popup footnotes yet.
Then just don't press on the name for it (or click on the link, whatever). Problem solved. Just because you have self-control issues doesn't mean that this (extremely) useful feature should be denied to others.
I'm a great believer in ebooks. However, this is one feature I don't want. It's a distraction, it pulls me away from my book and I end up on a Wikipedia binge instead of finishing what I set out to do. It's not good for my attention span.