I’ve been reading George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire on and off for a couple years now, and just recently began the fifth installment in the series, A Dance with Dragons. I read the first three books on my Kindle Fire, but switched over to Kindle for iPad when I received an iPad as a gift for Christmas last December. I have enjoyed the stories immensely, including their counterparts in the HBO original series.

I didn’t think I would enjoy fantasy writing as much as I have. My only real experience with the genre prior to this has been through the staples of Western liberal arts education: Greek and Roman mythology, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and others of the sort. I think Martin can be a bit verbose, particularly in describing the color, length, and style of Westerosi garb donned by a given character in a scene of action. But the Game of Thrones universe has a rich history and vast lands, and I admire the complexity of Martin’s vision and imagination in fusing the whole world together.

Still, it’s difficult at times to keep it all straight, much less bring the specific context Martin envisions for a given paragraph or page to bear on a conversation or action sequence.

Somebody could make a lot of money off people like me by developing and selling a Kindle plugin that could instantly bring up a pop up window that connects a selection of highlighted text to an entry in an index of canonical historical entries, functioning much like Kindle’s native dictionary.

The Kindle Fire operates on Android, and my Kindle for iPad runs on iOS 7, so I don’t know if this is even possible, or if Amazon has an OS on which such a capability could be developed. But with Disney’s purchase of the STAR WARS franchise, and the inevitable licensing of future Extended Universe works that could flow from new stories it intends to create, it seems like content producers and consumers alike stand to benefit from a solution like this.

Of course, if something like this already exists, my point is moot. But sometimes these ideas strike me, and I have to write them down. If it doesn’t exist, however, consider this some free brainstorming.