Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisChillin
It's not that simple, as if it all could be decided on one make-or-break point. But most of us aren't single-issue voters.
On balance, the Kindle has the best combination of features, support, and overall value to make me decide in its favor. So that's what I want and what I'm getting. Yet the Kindle will remain limited in its usefulness so long as a standardized, stable reference rubric isn't in place. As a PhD candidate, I will continue to purchase a great many physical books that I might otherwise have gotten in eBook format. You cannot acceptably cite the "location" of a reference.
This can be fixed. The Kindle doesn't just have to be for novels and other casual reading.
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I was a PhD student in the past, and I can see where some of those here are coming from, but things were just as bad for printed documents as they are now with ebooks. With multiple editions of books, varying content, etc you had to really make sure your references were clean and accurate (total pages, edition number, etc).
I'm not sure why someone couldn't do something similar with ebooks. It is something that will have to be adopted through MLA or other formatting groups, but I don't see how identifying a specific location, the total number of locations, and even the file format couldn't work for ebooks and references.
A lot of the problems are going to exist as long as we have multiple formats. Right now, it will be epub vs. mobi vs. pdf.... Then, even if we get a standard format or standard method for ebooks and documents that work, we'll always have the issue of eboook vs. print. That's just how its going to be. Everyone is going to have to adapt to some extent be in the companies, the authors, or the consumers who do the reading. Locations do probably need changing, but I think it is a bit optimistic to think there will be one solution that works.