Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Jeff, how do you handle differing page numbers in say a hard cover vs a paperback or even a different edition where page numbers change?
|
This is certainly a problem in the pbook world, but editions have been with us for more than a century, and researchers citing modern books build that into their footnotes. These days each edition must be a separate ISBN, so that provides yet some additional precision for citation, if a book is modern enough to have an ISBN. Most researchers cite the editions you find in libraries, which are for the most part the first hardcover editions. This isn't foolproof, but in my own research area (the history of religion) I've had relatively little trouble following citations even when multiple editions of a work exist.
As print publishing comes to rely more and more on POD technology over the next 15 or 20 years, we may find that pagefall in a trade paperback is identical to that in a hardcover. To a POD machine the two are the same; the only difference being the sort of binding that the printed pages are given.
That will likely be how print books fade into a specialty from the mainstream: Publishers will no longer print in bulk, but will publish an ebook and a POD pbook simultaneously, and let the purchaser choose paperback vs. hardcover vs. ebook at the time of purchase, based on a "master view" that may be stored as a PDF or something better. This could work by ordering online or through book machines in the back rooms of bookstores. I call that "replenish-on-demand" and have spoken of it on my blog, though it's OT here. A system like that is certainly how I'd prefer to do it.
Even if print books were to vanish by next week, we'd still have the fundamental question of how to unambiguously cite a passage in a reflowable ebook in a device and reader-independent way without using hyperlinks. Ebooks in fact represent a golden opportunity to solve that problem, but I don't see much interest in the industry for solving it.