[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

For a book which in which footnotes are not citations, but actual information, I like them inline, so long as they are relatively short. I put them in .9 em and italic so they can be skipped over if the reader likes. I put them right at the end of the associated paragraph so what they apply to can be readily seen.

Hmmm so this was a physical/PDF book that you worked on, and changed to an EPUB? Mind posting examples of this in action (with links to the original PDF if possible)?

Originally Posted by phossler

Obviously the footnote at the foot of the page image on an ereader is not going to work

Yes yes, by "foot"notes (belong at the footer of the page) I mean "end"notes (at the end of the chapter). In EPUBs most people get lazy and just use foot/end interchangeably (since almost everyone sticks them at the end of chapter/in a separate chapter).

Originally Posted by phossler

So it seems like there are 2 kinds of notes? Cites and additional material?

This current EPUB I am working on, it has the mother of all footnotes. It spans 7 pages:

<p><sup>1</sup> <i>The Social Organism</i>.</p>

  <p>The difference between an organization and an organism is hard to define, simply because we do not know what life is. An organism is an organized unit possessed of the mysterious thing that we call life — a fact and a concept from the field of biology.</p>

  <p>The distinction between a social organization and a social organism is the same distinction: a social organism must be a something in which the principle of life is the basis of the organization. Social organizations there are without limit. Each of us may be a member at large in an indefinite number — the family, the church in its different branches, the State in its different subdivisions, the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Royal Society, the Academy, the Anti-Tuberculosis League, the International Peace Society, the reading circle, the Club, and the football team — perhaps also in the world and the Universe. Are all of these also organisms in the sense of things themselves alive, rather than merely made up — some of them — of things which are separately alive?</p>

  <p>They may be: how can we know, not knowing what life is? The biologists do not so declare them; they see no evidence of the centralizing, coördinating, organizing activity of that strange fact called life. Each of these organizations appears to lack that sort of unity which we call individuality. But it may none the less be there. In a family of father, mother, and two children, there may be, unknown to any member of it, still another member, a fifth individual, the family itself. There may be, indeed, two or three or a dozen of these others; how shall we deny it? Unproved, it is also undisproved — and undisprovable. We do not know. Likewise, how can we assert it? For anything that we know to</p>

 <p>the contrary, every atom in the Universe may have each its separate psychic aspect and activities — herein resting the secret of chemical affinity: their souls are drawn to one another or are seeking their mates. But is it science to assert it or to assume it? And have we thereby explained anything? One mystery is not the competent solution of another. This sort of explanation is merely pseudo-explanation — faith or metaphysics or guess. In similar jargon, principles are sometimes said to be working themselves out, or to be engaged in the process of realizing themselves. But talk like this means merely that some unknown X is doing something or other. We recall from Goethe “Men often think, if only words they hear, that therewith goes material for thinking.” So also Gilbert and Sullivan:</p>

 <blockquote> <p>“Her gentle spirit rolls</p>

  <p>Through the melody of souls; —</p>

  <p>Which is doubtless very pretty,</p>

  <p>But I don’t know what it means.”</p></blockquote>

  <p class="noindent">Nevertheless it may roll. It may be that the Universe, as a unified organized thing, is alive in every detail — an organism in the biological sense — as Pan-psychism declares to be the ultimate truth. Surely somewhere in the Universe all that there is in it has its explanation — if only we could find it. But the mere assertion of this large fact — taking it as a fact — is not an explanation of all the intermediate subordinate facts. After all, what is <i>explanation</i> in our human sense? We understand not one whit the better any single item out of a great whole, by discovering that, taking it as a whole, it stands for us as merely one gigantic flux and pow-wow. To assert this is rather so far a confession of our total lack of understanding. The social organism people greatly need to master the distinction between an explanation and a mystery. It is not the solution of a problem to give it up, nor the unriddling of your riddle to confess that you yourself have no solution.</p>

  <p class="margintop">Good rhetorical usage does doubtless permit us to speak of human beings in aggregates, with the use of a singular verb: <i>the Committee is agreed; the group disperses; Congress votes; the army is marching</i>. We may talk of public opinion, <i>esprit de corps</i>, the spirit of the times. But probably no one understands this collective use to imply or to assume organic unity.</p>

  <p>Equally well we may say that <i>the army are marching</i>, <i>the committee are agreed</i> (with one another), the proper use depending on whether the group is taken as a whole or by its constituent units; <i>the crew was exhausted</i> or <i>the crew were exhausted</i> — accordingly as we mean one thing or the other. Though the act or the situation is really one of each individual separately, there is no actual ambiguity or uncertainty involved in saying that <i>the battalion is eating dinner</i>. The activities are similar, roughly simultaneous, and are thought of in block. True, one man eats rapidly, another slowly, some little, and others much, and a few sick ones not at all, — but the expression serves, and implies its own limitations of accuracy. And so of an army, when we say that <i>it marches</i>, no doubt is even faintly suggested that each one does his own walking, works his own muscles, uses up his own tissue, and that presumably many are halt, some falling out by the wayside, while still others limp, and some swear. But no one of these differences matters for the purposes of the thought in mind. True, the expression is in strictness inaccurate, were any perversity bent on misinterpreting it. But when it comes to asserting that the army is brushing its teeth or has stubbed its toe, there is obvious difficulty.</p>

  <p>And for purposes of the accurate analysis of the price problem, there is really the same difficulty in thinking of a social coldness or hunger or desire or pleasure or pain. In the price problem, the need is to understand precisely how the particular individuals arrive at their respective demand prices. There is no one single homogeneous utility nor any one single aggregate demand price. Utility, for the purposes of the analysis, is an individual category. Even in public finance, the tax costs and the public services are ultimately individual.</p>

  <p class="margintop">It must, at any rate, be clear that if society is an organism at all, it is an organism of a very low order — like, say, the jellyfish. But it is only to the higher orders of organisms that mind and thought and purpose and will can be confidently ascribed. To interpret social phenomena in any organic sense adapted to explain them, as connoting judgment, appraisal, comparison, approval, condemnation, — the social organism must take on the attributes of personality.</p>

  <p>So far as we can make out, personality implies a distinct, separate, and centralized psychic unity, in which at least four things are essential — thought, will, consciousness, and memory. Try to make out what the <i>you</i> would be, lacking any one of these. What makes <i>you you?</i> Unconsciousness means the suspension of individuality. Perhaps thought and will are not quite so clearly essential. But, obviously enough, there is no personality without memory — the cement that binds together states of consciousness which would otherwise be unrelated. What makes the <i>you</i> of the present moment the same person with the <i>you</i> of a half year ago? Dual personality is a duality of independent memory systems. If in the next life we are to remember nothing of this one, it cannot greatly matter whether we are to live again or not; immortality, on terms of entire forgetfulness, would be a valueless gift — not the continued life of one, but the birth of some one else. So far, then, as we know, there is no social organism in the sense of a personality fulfilling this fourfold test — fulfilling, indeed, any one of the four tests.</p>

  <p class="margintop">Not the less, however, must it be frankly admitted that a mere hypothesis, as sheer assumption, if it offer a working explanation of facts which otherwise must go without explanation, becomes thereby something more than mere hypothesis or assumption. That it fits the facts, harmonizes them, unifies them, makes them consistent when nothing else will, is some inductive support of its truth. On these terms, any hypothesis, however tentative, may stand, pending the coming of something better. The organic hypothesis may, in truth, be so far better than nothing. But not much better; it leaves us in the unsatisfactory position not only of affirming that of which we can have no knowledge — which is bad — but of affirming a thing of which we also affirm that we can never have any knowledge — which is worse.</p>

<p>But will the social organism hypothesis meet this test of sole unifier of the facts? Are there other possible explanations? Are we yet compelled to resort to these devices of speculation and quasi-explanation? It is at any rate a crass abuse of hypothesis if it be made to stand as an obstacle in the way of the search for an explanation in terms of what is already known. A hypothesis can never be employed as the refutation of any offered explanation, as answer to it, or defense, or objection; it holds its place by tolerance — by the mere negative fact that nothing else is available. It has no evidential quality or argumentative validity. It is rather a standing promise of abdication in favor of anything that can make an affirmative case. It is an invitation and an exhortation to continued research and to constructive effort.</p>

  <p class="margintop">Does, then, the social organism hypothesis fit the facts of a competitive society? It might do well enough — if nothing else would — for the collectivist or socialistic form of organization; but does it express the divisions and antagonisms of interest and activity characteristic of a competitive organization — the preying of cell on cell? When, at the equation of market price, a bushel of wheat is exchanging against a dollar of gold, shall we abandon the demand schedule with all of its different items of offer of gold, and the supply schedule with its different reservation prices — each item of price offer and of supply having its distinct explanation in individual comparisons and individual choices of alternatives — and shall we, pronouncing all these unactual and inadequate, a hopeless quest, betake ourselves to the explanation that society, in its organic unity, has appraised gold separately as a value, and wheat separately as a value, and has found them as equal values, so that now an equality in exchange relations can occur? Or, if a football coach is accorded a salary of a thousand dollars a month and an instructor in Economics a salary of a thousand a year, shall there be offered, as ultimate and final explanation, the statement that society, the world at large, or the Universe, organically approves or appraises or values one service twelve times as highly as the other? And if a highway robber gains $200 from ten minutes of daring and a cellar digger two dollars for 600 minutes of boredom, it will be evident that society appraises the pains and waitings of the one at a worth of $20 a minute against a worth for the other of 1/3 cent a minute. And when the monopolist, by producing half as much product, gets twice as much gain, it will be clear that society evaluates the half at twice as much as the whole — the interference with production at double the contribution to production. There should evidently be somewhere a social insane asylum in which to confine the social organism. So when the lawyer, skillful in advising his clients how legally to do illegal things, gets especially generous fees, this shall be the proof that society finds his services to be highly beneficent. When canned poison brings 20 cents per can and canned corn half as much, this shall be taken to be the idiotic judgment of the aggregate social idiot. By similar devisings, also, are to be explained the dear cheapnesses, the adulterations, the lying advertisings, the prostitutes, the vice trusts, the gambling syndicates, the purchased judicial honor, the offices sold at a price, the elections bought by money for gain, the speculations, the sinecures and the graft; society is organically plundering its organic self, buying itself, selling itself, lying to itself, poisoning itself, making (part of) itself rich at the expense of (part of) itself. And all these market prices and all these individual gains shall stand — by proof of hypothesis — as the appraisals of the racial judgment.</p>



  <p>But to many men who accept the point of view of the social organism, the foregoing criticism will appeal as mere travesty. They mean none of the things charged against them. They do not take society to be a great animal — either male or female, or both or neither. All that they mean is that men in society are in mutual relations of influence and interaction, that each man has truly his individual tastes, choices, desires, demands, costs, sacrifices, hopes and fears, but not separately in the sense that any one is free from the influence of others and of their shaping power — free, that is, from the social <i>milieu</i> in which he has lived. We want clothing as much because other people’s glances beat upon us as that the sun’s rays scorch us. We desire the admiration, the approval, the fear, and the envy of our fellows. Of this sort may be most of the significance of palaces, carriages, champagne, or neckties. We never act or think or feel in isolation. We are individuals <i>in a society</i>. In a sense, therefore, the individual’s desires are social in their derivation: Utility to the individual is a social utility.</p>

  <p>That so much as this is true must be admitted; and let it forthwith be added that no one ever doubted it. But when one has a desire — no matter whence it came — it is his desire, and not the desire of the world at large. No matter when or where or how you get hungry, it is now your hunger, and not the hunger of the fresh air or the long walk that gave it to you. It may, indeed, be due to the fact that you have seen others eating. Even the feeling of being cold may be social in its occasion. But your cold is not thereby a social cold. You may, in truth, feel so much the colder as you see the people about you the more snug and smug. Your cold does not then translate into a social warmness. Your piety, again, may have been taught you; but it is not now the piety of your parents, or of the neighborhood, but only of yourself — even as a breakfast to which all climates have contributed is one man’s breakfast rather than an international breakfast. Perhaps your brother’s impiety has come as a reaction against the overpiety of his neighbors; but it is not now either a social piety or a social impiety. If you get the bubonic plague <i>via</i> some international rat, it will not be Asia or the rat or the world, but you that will be sick; and if you die, the funeral rites will be said over you. The resultant from a parallelogram of forces is not all of the contributing directions at once, but one definite new direction.</p>


  <p class="margintop">Note, finally, how far the interpretation of the social organism must go. If the fact that one’s tastes and habits are copied from other men makes these tastes and habits not his but theirs; if the mists floating inland from the sea are still sea, the grain from the soil still soil, the soil that was rock still rock, the skippers in the cheese still cheese; if origin and genesis not merely shape and determine what a man is, but also define him in terms of themselves, make him them, absorb him, — we shall, by this route, arrive not at social estimates, social desires, and social values, but at cosmic judgments, cosmic estimates, and cosmic valuations. For to our contemporaries, truly, is due much of the shaping of us; but still more is due to the generation next preceding, or to all the endless past. Many also of our individual aims and activities have in view future human beings — our descendants or the race in general, their admiration, their approval, or their welfare. The social organism in the sense of <i>the directive society</i> must include all human generations of all races and of all times, past, present, and to come.</p>

  <p>But if our quest is for origins — for directive, determining, shaping facts, we must include more than the influence of human associations past and present. We shall include as well all the past environment and no small part of the future — the storms of the past centuries and the storms that are yet to be — the wild animals that we have made our prey and the wild animals that have made us their prey — the malevolent microbes and the beneficent — the pestilences that have walked and are walking by night, and the fevers of primitive and of present noondays — all past climates and all past suns and all seas and rains.</p>

  <p>Nor are we to forget that other suns and the most distant stars are raining their beams upon us and prompting us to poetry and romance and to scientific moonshine — and have been at it for countless generations, and will remain at it for some time yet. It follows that all the past and the future of the solar system and of all the stars in the infinite spaces are within the causal complex. There is nothing for it but to learn to think and talk of <i>the social cosmos</i>. And once having learned to think clearly in this emphasis, we shall shortly have the logical insight to see that the word <i>social</i> is mere tautology; we shall talk simply of the <i>cosmos</i>. And having found, as our great conclusion, that all things are explained by the cosmos, we shall — perhaps — return to our place of beginning, ready to fare forth, unincumbered, in the search for real explanations.</p>

I don't know... I think the best way to handle it would be at the end of the chapter with a numbered link.

Originally Posted by phossler

So what are your thoughts on a 'one size doesn't fit all' approach?

a. Cites to a source document would seem to work best using a non-superscript [##] hyperlink to end-of-chapter Notes. I almost always have each chapter in a separate file so no complicated RegEx.

b. For actual information, the inline but distinctively set off seems less disruptive to the reading flow.

It is sometimes very difficult to tell what the author's actual INTENT was with the footnote. To maintain consistency, I would go with either/or and stick with it throughout the entire book (consistency).

So I would not go out of my way to make SOME footnotes inline, and SOME footnotes at the end of the chapter with [##] links. (Unless of course, this is how it was designed in the original print book/PDF).

Originally Posted by phossler

c. Additional walk-on question. Is it really necessary these hyperlinking days to use the paper book footnote number approach (regardless of formatting). I have a hard time hitting such a small target on a good day. It would seem that hyperlinking from a word or phrase to the noted material and reversing by hyperlinking back would be more ebook friendly

It might be tough to know exactly what the author intended:

Should the entire sentence be included in the hyperlink?
Should just the last three words be included in the hyperlink?
Should just the sentence in quotes be included?
What happens in the case of footnotes in footnotes?

I think the only way to know would be if you were working directly from HTML source where the author ALREADY HAD HYPERLINKS IN MIND WHEN WRITING the document. For example, if you are transferring blog posts (or maybe MobileRead footnote discussions) -> EPUB.

Also speaking of footnotes, if the original book begins from footnote #1 (OR *) on each individual page, I do not mind renumbering the footnotes to make it easier for the ebook version. I personally see it getting crazy in the EPUB seeing:

[1] [1] [1] [2] [3] [1] [1] [1] [2]

OR

[*][*][*] [†] [‡][*][*][*] [†]

In the EPUB, how do you know which number/symbol you came from, and how to jump back? There are way too many '1's and '*'.

This is a case where footnotes cannot transfer well to the EPUB/MOBI equivalents.

I personally use some code that I run all of my EPUBs through which generates all the footnotes for me subsequently per chapter (so it begins from "1" each chapter). Thus I get:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

For example, I have attached the original PDF + my EPUB version of "Letters to Mr. Malthus" by Jean-Baptiste Say to this post.

There is also the HTML version of the book created by the "Online Library of Liberty":

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php...95&layout=html

• The original book uses symbols starting over on each page: *, †, ‡, §, ‖, ¶, ...
• OLL tends towards using the original footnote symbols in their HTML versions.
• I tend towards using the sequential numbering system.

Perhaps keeping the original symbols + page numbers might be one of your goals if you are working on non-fiction, where citation of older books might be important. In this case, you might want to make your anchors more descript:

<p><a href="#ft1" id="fn1">[*]</a>

Might change to something like:

<p><a href="#ftpg351-1" id="fnpg351-1">[*]</a>

As you can see, this is all a balancing act, depending on what your ultimate goals are.

In my case, you can always just go back to the original PDFs and see if you wanted to cite the book (everything is free). But you can use the EPUB version for actual reading.

As a side note, you can read some more about Footnotes on the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footnote