Quote:
Originally Posted by Busirane
I was recently reading Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" on my K2, and it has physical page numbers corresponding to a specific print edition. They are embedded as [N] in the text; at first I took them for end notes, but once I realized they were page numbers, they became fairly unobtrusive.
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Those of us in the legal profession have been dealing with this for decades now, since the advent of Lexis and Westlaw and rules that still require citation to print books.
It might be "unobtrusive" with one page number, but wait until there are multiple editions. For US Supreme Court decisions, there are three paper editions, each denoted by a * before the page number. It is anything but unobtrusive.
And of course the services providing the book-to-electronic conversions are very expensive. Considering how much trouble we often have getting simple, decent formatting out of book publishers, what makes you think that we could get this additional service that requires hours and hours of hand-coding without the books tripling in price?
The solution is for the old stodgy institutions to adapt. That includes academic libraries buying Kindle editions the same way that law libraries buy Lexis, Westlaw and other licenses for electronic format books. Then a Kindle cite would be no more hard to find than any other cite (and might even be easier because it could be looked up on a computer instead of requiring a trip to a library).