[Air-L] Citing from a Kindle

[Alex Halavais]

Actually, I think the solution jeremy dismisses is the obvious one:
you should cite to a URI. It's a shame that copyright laws make
that... difficult. In some ways, I suspect a resource that was *like*
Google Books, and provided a fragment with context, would be useful.
So if I talk about reasons to cite sources I could drop a link
(http://bit.ly/reasonstocite), and fulfill at least the findability
function of the citation.

But, of course, this raises its own problems. Not all books are in
Preview or Full on Google Books (whether that is a good or a bad thing
is, of course, an issue of hot debate), the traditional library system
is nicely redundant and distributed, providing some reliability
(though one could imagine a distributed alternative to Google Books
without too much difficulty). Not to mention the issues of URI
ugliness, shortener (like the bit.ly link above) longevity and
obscurity, and the like.

I disagree with the idea, however, that we should maintain page
numbers as a form of due diligence. There comes a time when we have to
get past horseless-carriage thinking, and recognize that when certain
communities are reading more off the page than on, it's time for a new
standard.

And I'll be bold enough to suggest that AIR, as a group, is a perfect
place to come to consensus on that standard. Who better?

Alex


On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:01 AM, jeremy hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
> direct quotes are less of a worry than providing reference, I'd think.  One can search for a direct quote and usually find it.   However, if someone is referencing an idea, we really do need the exact page or location of the item in question.   My solution is simple, go to the library and find the page number.   That to me is just doing 'due diligence' as an author citing another's work.  I work primarily with e-books, usually in pdf format with page numbers, but when it is missing... I go to the library and look up the page number.   Sometimes i can also find it in google books or amazon books.   In short, that you have a gadget that transforms the text... that doesn't mean you should be using that gadget's lack of provision/affordance to not provide page numbers as justification for providing less useful/common information, as the reason for providing the citation is not for your use, but for the rest of the world who does not necessarily use the gadget that you have.
>
> For instance, I have transformed around 100 books into fragments and reconstructions for my own use, i keep them in slipbox.   They are still the 'books', but they are in a format that I use.   Should i be able to say... oh you should all use slipbox, it is slip 1754 in stack 5, downloadable here.   .... I'm guessing not.  Even if slipbox had a standard methodology and was used by 500k people, it isn't about those people, it is about the readers. So, please look up the page numbers if you can.
>
> granted, that in some scholarly topics there are unique citation traditions, such as in plato, aristotle, kant, etc. and one should stick with the tradition which is most commonly used centrally to the tradition, i'd guess.
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