These versions are amazing! I love using them so much and they are invaluable on my iPad where navigating the SC site can be a bit of a pain compared to an ebook. I’ve been using them to do a lot of jumping around to read all the references in A History of Mindfulness.
Sorry if this is a lot of feedback, but hopefully some of it is useful
Cover art broken in iBooks for iOS
Maybe this is related to the epub version or not, but it’s a strange little bug.
On iBooks iOS (ipad and iphone) the cover art doesn’t show for these books, even though on iBooks for macOS, they do show:
iOS is iOS12, though this also happened in iOS 11. macOS is High Sierra, haven’t upgraded yet.
This isn’t the end of the world, but would be nice to have fixed in the long run.
Could cover art have bigger text, and Pali version of title?
Separately, while I love the cover art, I’d vote to make the actual title much much bigger, as an icon on my devices, I kind of prefer the auto-generated one just because it makes the title bigger.
It would also be great to have both the english and pali names in big letters. They are usually referred to with their pali names and I always do a double-take when I need to figure out which of the english versions I need (which is actually a useful training opportunity, but still, I bet a lot of people would appreciate having both).
+1 for Pali names of each sutta in its header
To echo something above: I’d also love to see the pali names of each sutta along with the english ones. I really enjoy having them both while reading here on the website, it helps me train my pali and sets me up to be able to recognize them by their pali names later. I doubt this duplication would bother anyone too much.
Reference code of each sutta in its header
I’d also strongly vote to have the “reference code” (sorry not sure what they are called!) repeated in the header of each sutta, like “MN 28” etc.
This would mean that when searching, I could type that code in search and go straight to the sutta, rather than having to search for the code, click on the result (which is in the index at the start) then click through to the actual sutta.
This sounds just annoying, but on my older iPad it’s actually very slow just to click links and go to the actual sutta (in addition to the search itself taking a long time). It would be really nice if the actual sutta location came up along with the index, and I could pick which of them I want to go to (since I still might want to read your extremely helpful summary in the index before reading).
Having the reference code in the header would also mean that the auto-generated ToC of the book would have these numbers, which I for one would really welcome. Having lists of the English sutta names, without numbers, makes it kind of impossible to navigate. If the numbers were in the headers, and in the ToC, then I could often skip the search entirely.
On top of all that, I think having the numbers visible all the time is a good training opportunity. I like trying to memorize the locations of the suttas I’m familiar with by the codes, and of course on the SC website we are rewarded enormously for knowing these numbers by heart (typing in URLs directly). Having this baked into these books would be great, and I doubt anyone would complain.
Linked Discourses: Chapters in ToC should be the Samyuttas, rather than individual suttas.
Not sure if this one came up already, so sorry if it did, but as of the version I downloaded, the “Contents” of the Linked Discourses file that shows in iBooks is an interminable list of every tiny sutta that’s pretty much impossible to scroll, and without any reference to the chapter each sutta belongs to, it’s even less plausible that I could ever use that list.
Seems to me that for the Linked Discourses, each Samyutta should be marked as a chapter, with each sutta as a subheading within the chapter, or something along those lines.
Maybe this is more of a limitation of iBooks, in which case sorry for making a fuss about it, but it’s a shame if that’s the case.
Either way, if you could get the idea above about having the reference codes show up in the ToC work, that would make a big difference here too, as at least the list of suttas would say e.g. SN 2.4: With Maghadha
and the list of such names would make the structure clear.
Thanks for considering these, and regardless for the amazing books! You’re making this kind of research so much more accessible in so many different ways