It definitely annoys me that I can’t cite a page number for an eBook. It makes the reading experience more difficult to share with others (and the web is all about sharing, right?) There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago (February 6, 2011) about this issue — “E-Books’ varied formats make citations a mess for scholars: Kindle,nook, and other devices put the same text on a different page,” by Tushar Rae. MLA, APA, and Univ. of Chicago, among others have all come up with alternatives but most scholars aren’t pleased. And what happened? A day later, Amazon announced that they will include page numbers for the Kindle. But will your page number and my page number lead us to the same place? Comments from our readers?
See the article — http://chronicle.com/article/E-Books-Varied-Formats-Make/126246/
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3 Responses to About eBooks and page numbers
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I have to admit I never even noticed that my Kindle doesn’t use page numbers until about a week ago. I got one of those annoying email forwards (which I usually delete, but since this one referenced books I actually participated) that asked you to go to the book closest to you, look at page 56 and write the 5th sentence, then forward blah, blah, blah. Well, the “book” closest to me was my Kindle, but alas I couldn’t find page 56 of the book since there were no page numbers. Only a minor annoyance for personal reading, but I can’t imagine the mess this is creating on college campuses. Interesting article!
Follow up: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-kindle-will-finally-get-page-numbers/
This is indeed frustrating. If a publisher is going to produce an eBook version of a book, it should be *identical* in every way to the print version (perhaps with a supplementary line stating that it is an electronic version etc. in the CIP data). Otherwise, the electronic versions are, as you’ve pointed out, completely uncitable!