I thought about this issue some years ago, because my wife is a literary scholar, so I tend to consider that side of things, even though it doesn't impact me directly.
Going forward, if this e-book thing really does take off, some way of absolute reckoning within a text that isn't dependent on pages is going to
have to emerge. For books where original or scanned files exist, page references will continue to work indefinately, but they may or may not, depending on the method, for things which are never published physically.
My thought is probably a paragraph or line numbering approach, either from the beginning or from chapters or whatever other type of sectioning makes sense, would work well enough, but it would need to be present and the same in all versions of the e-publication. Preferably, it could be toggled on and off in the reading software.
I think, however, that this is yet another example something that's dependent on a "standard" e-book format, and would need to be built into both files and viewing software in order to be at all viable.
Just my thoughts, salt to taste.
