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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2013The Kindle edition of Gerald Posner's 1993 book "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK" came out recently. Those who look for an electronically formatted version of this influential book to make their study of the topic easier should find this Kindle edition helpful. All table-of-content entries, footnotes, and citations are hyperlinked, allowing easier navigation through the book. Footnotes and citations are two-way hyperlinkable: you can go to them and back to the main text (of course, Kindle has a "back" button that does the same thing). A traditional index section is also included, with hyperlinks as well. The image gallery of the print edition is also carried over, although the pictures are slightly blurrier on the Kindle. The Kindle edition contains some pictures not found on the print edition, and vice versa. The Kindle edition has some color photos of Zapruder film frames, but is missing the print edition's shocking photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby.
There are some flaws in the placements of the hyperlinks, however. If a footnote and citation happen to be right next to each other, you will find it difficult, or even impossible, to access their hyperlinks correctly. For instance, if a sentence ends with a citation number 57 and a footnote asterisk (i.e. 57*), you will find it extremely hard to use your finger to tap with pin-point precision what you want. On the iPad, I can only tap one hyperlink but not the other, even if I enlarge the font to an enormous size. On an iPod Touch's much smaller screen, I can only tap the correct item with trial and error. If the item is close to the edge of the screen, I may, of course, trigger a page-turn or the appearance of the menu bars. The most success I have is with the PC or Mac edition of the Kindle software, where the mouse allows pin-point clicking of all items.
Kindle readers that use keypad instead of touch-screen for navigation may also work better, but I don't have one to try. Neither do I have one of those stylus-based tablets like Galaxy Note, which should make it easier to tap on those tiny hyperlinks. Styli are also available for iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch, but most have flat round tips that don't help with pin-point tapping. There are fine-point styli out there, but I don't know one that is good enough to recommend.
Note to all future creators of Kindle books: if you have multiple hyperlinks next to one another, please ensure that BLANK SPACE be added to separate them so we can tap on them correctly on tablets or mobile devices.
"Case Closed" happens to have an enormous amount of footnotes and citations, so this flaw affects my accessing some of the footnotes. My workaround is go to a PC and manually add a pop-up note containing the footnote (by copying and pasting) and place it where you can access it. Then sync all your Kindle devices and apps.
This problem is compounded by the fact that on the Kindle edition, all footnotes are put at the END OF EACH CHAPTER, instead of being put on the same page of the main text as it is usually done for print editions. By dumping all the footnotes at the end of a chapter, all footnotes denoted by asterisk (*), dagger, and double dagger are mixed together, so you have no way to tell which part of the book they correspond to.
On the print edition of "Case Closed", footnotes are put at the bottom of the same page of the main text, as they should be, so there is no confusing asterisk and dagger of one page from those on another page.
I am, of course, aware that on a Kindle book or any electronic book, there is really no "bottom of a page". On an e-book, where a user can change font size and line spacing and even set multi-column display, what appears at the bottom of a page in one instance may appear somewhere else the next. This flexible changing of text position is called "text reflow" in computer lingo. That makes it impossible to designate any given position as "bottom of a page" for you to put footnotes in.
But if all footnotes are dumped at the end of a chapter, they should probably have been denoted in enumerated form, such as (a), (b), (c), etc.
As I mentioned, the Kindle edition includes a traditional index section at the end of the book, with hyperlinks that take you back to the original text. Unfortunately, the index hyperlinks unhelpfully take you to the TOP of a page on the PRINT EDITION. Due to "text reflow" that is the nature of e-book, this may not be the position you desire on the Kindle. For instance, the index of "Lee Bowers" takes me to what is supposed to be the top of Page 253 on the print edition. But the text "Lee Bowers" is actually located much further down on Page 253, which, on the Kindle, may appear on the next page or several pages further. I have seen this problem on a number of Kindle books, which leads me to believe that it is probably unfixable. Most users would instead find Kindle's search function much more useful and convenient in locating text.
Posner is a proponent of the lone-gunman, single-bullet theory. But his book should be required reading for all serious students of the assassination due to thoroughness of Posner's research and the book's excellent presentation of the findings. In 1998, a CBS poll found that only 10% of Americans believed Osward had acted alone. This year, a new poll revealed that the percentage had increased to 24%. I would like to think that Posner's book had something to do with that. Still, the fact remains that a majority of Americans do not believe in the official story of a lone assassin. This will likely stay the same for some time to come as mistrust of our government continues to remain at a high level.
Like all books on JFK's assassination, "Case Closed" cites numerously from the Warren Commission Report. For serious readers, it may help to have an electronic copy of WCR handy as well. My comment section includes the websites where you can download the complete WCR for free. These documents include the main report, plus 26 volumes of witness testimonies and photos of exhibits (in PDF files of good-resolution scans).
