[Air-L] Citing from a Kindle

Anders Fagerjord anders.fagerjord at media.uio.no
Thu Jan 6 02:15:08 PST 2011


Dear all,

I do not agree with Jeremy that we should hunt down a paper edition of an electronic text just to find a few page numbers.

Kindle books have "location" numbers that do not change when the reader changes the text size, so it is no problem to cite a specific place. Here is an example in Chicago note style:
 
"[…] students enjoy lessons they can understand" 

Richard E. Mayer, _Multimedia Learning_, 2 ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Kindle e-book, loc. 1063.

What if professor Oldschool does not have the Kindle version? Well, she may not have the same print edition as I have either. Also printed books may exist in many versions with different pagination. I have in my office at least four different books containing the same essay by Roland Barthes. Any of these editions are good enough to refer to, even though my reader may have another edition. Adding an electronic version does not change this situation, it just adds to the number of editions.

Furthermore, scholarship has developed ways to deal with different editions centuries ago. 

Everyone knows how the Bible is divided into chapters and verses. That is one very precise solution, more fine-grained than page numbers. Many disciplines use similar numbering of sections in their writings (but rarely so fine-grained as Bible verses, admittedly).

When classics scholars refer to Aristotle, they use the pagination of Bekker's 19th century edition. This pagination is inserted in the margins of new editions. If i quote from p. 52 of my edition of the Poetics, I would refer to it as  appearing in "poet. 1450b" (1450b being the page and column in Bekker's ed.). Online journals (and all journals are online today) could easily adopt this, if they also have a print edition, and insert the page numbers into the online text. Joseph Reagle shared another interesting example with us the other day (http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/chapter-1) 

Unfortunately, the open ePub format does not have stable location numbers as far as I know. 

I think rule 16.14 of the Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) is practical, and sums up much of what has been written in this debate: 

"Electronic sources often do not use page numbers. Readers may be able to perform a search for a quotation from an electronic source. When possible, however, a subhead, a chapter or paragraph number, or a descriptive phrase that follows the organizational divisions of the work cited is used [….]" 

(This appears on p. 598 in print, but could thus also be identified as section 16.14 or "Locators for unpaginated electronic sources".)

I also hope scholarly journals will allow hyperlinks. Virtually all academic journals have Web versions. They can be linked to, and they can include links to the papers they cite. This was Ted Nelson's vision four decades ago.

--anders

--
Anders Fagerjord, dr.art.
Associate professor, Head of Studies

Department of Media and Communication,
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1093 Blindern
N-0317 OSLO
Norway

http://www.media.uio.no   http://fagerjord.no








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