[Ken Irving]

<<F.Y.I., the American Psychological Association (APA) put out these guidelines for academic citations of Kindle content last summer:

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/20...-a-kindle.html>>

Guidelines like that are a good idea, but as the APA page points out, some suggested citation styles require you to have a particular reader, while others require the ebook to be formatted with citation in mind, and even then one has to count paragraphs in order to get a precise location. That's not easy to do even in a printed book, much less in a book you are seeing piece by piece on a screen. The fundamental problem is twofold: ebook formats were not made with citation by precise location in mind, and thus have no standards for this; and readers that use those formats tend to implement what standards there are very differently anyway. If academics get together and come up with a set of e-reader standards for "e-paginaton" that ereaders must use in order to be certified for academic use, that might force some consistency. Companies like Amazon and B&N that are actively courting the academic market will listen if they think not using a pagination standard will lose big sales, or give the competition an edge. Until then, it's like the wild west when it comes to finding your place in an ebook, and telling someone else just exactly where that place is.