MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Page numbers in ebooks for scholarly research?

sartori · 11-09-2007, 01:27 AM

I've been thinking about the issue of identifying which version of a document you may be looking at while researching. For example:

Say I quote chapter 3, paragraph 11 from a book listed on site 1 that is listed as Alice In Wonderland.epub. Somebody looking at my work decides to lookup the quote from a document called Alice In Wonderland.epub on site 2. The only problem is site 2 has marked the paragraph starting point incorrectly so my reference makes no sense.

I have read that each epub document (and probably most others) require an ID number. Could this ID number be a 10 digit checksum generated from the actual content of the html source? That way, even if one character is changed in the source the checksum would change.

Then when I reference my quote it could be something like Chapter 3, Paragraph 11 - Alice In Wonderland.epub [5684937643]. It should be pretty easy to create a tool that would verify the checksum I typed. Now I could verify any document as being the same one originally referenced no matter where the file was obtained.

Edit: Of course this does nothing to help verify that the document I quoted from was correct in the first place.

Rob

11-09-2007, 01:27 AM	#92
sartori Connoisseur Posts: 54 Karma: 29 Join Date: Oct 2006	I've been thinking about the issue of identifying which version of a document you may be looking at while researching. For example: Say I quote chapter 3, paragraph 11 from a book listed on site 1 that is listed as Alice In Wonderland.epub. Somebody looking at my work decides to lookup the quote from a document called Alice In Wonderland.epub on site 2. The only problem is site 2 has marked the paragraph starting point incorrectly so my reference makes no sense. I have read that each epub document (and probably most others) require an ID number. Could this ID number be a 10 digit checksum generated from the actual content of the html source? That way, even if one character is changed in the source the checksum would change. Then when I reference my quote it could be something like Chapter 3, Paragraph 11 - Alice In Wonderland.epub [5684937643]. It should be pretty easy to create a tool that would verify the checksum I typed. Now I could verify any document as being the same one originally referenced no matter where the file was obtained. Edit: Of course this does nothing to help verify that the document I quoted from was correct in the first place. Rob Last edited by sartori; 11-09-2007 at 01:29 AM.