[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Sure, I understand this kind of book but when someone needs to reference it I would hope they can reference a particular edition since the data itself is likely to be wrong if they reference the wrong edition.

In many cases, the minor digital edition changes are not marked, so you would have no idea which ebook "version" you have exactly.

Example #1

Again, I go back to my example of Game of Thrones. It was an EPUB I downloaded and purchased from B&N when it came out. A few years later, I downloaded again, and believe I got the 15th EPUB revision (only because B&N appended "v15" to the filename).

Enough changed in the book, that the ADE-page numbers were thrown off between v1 and v15. They did things like changed lists to use <div>+CSS instead of <li>, typo corrections, fixed some italics, [...].

If I never had access to the v1 EPUB on the day of release, or I wasn't code-savvy, I wouldn't have a clue anything changed.

There is also typically no way to get OLDER revisions of the EPUBs..... I don't have any way to get my hands on any of the inbetween v1->v14 versions. Typically it just gets replaced with the latest and greatest.

And this is only B&N!

• Maybe 15 revisions on B&N were pushed.
• Maybe 5 on the publisher's website, because they only pushed the larger revisions.
• Maybe 20 on iBooks (adding in little iBooks-only CSS tweaks, etc., etc.).
• Maybe 30 on Kindle (code to get around poorly displaying stuff on pre-KF8 Kindles, or updating code when new higher-def Kindles were released).
  • And to solve a Kindle-only problem, there would be no need to revise the EPUBs.

Example #2

I mostly do work in Non-Fiction books. A large fraction of my work tends to be cleaning up poorly converted EPUB editions. It is the same book, the same text, but I just go in and strip out crap like:

<p class="paragraph"><span>This is a <span class="italics">sample</span> sentence.</span></p>

<p>This is a <i>sample</i> sentence.</p>

It is STILL the "First Edition" of the book. No text has changed, but there was serious HTML+CSS cleanup happening in the backend. Some publishers may mark something like "Second Ebook Edition, November 2017" to the copyright page, but most don't (nor could that be relied upon).

And again, what is large enough to count as a "change". If I fix a single typo? If I change a single line in the CSS? If I stripped out the useless <span>s?

I again go back to one of the largest EPUBs I ever worked on, a 1.4 million word beast (15 years of articles from a journal), the minor OCR+typo corrections threw off the ADE page numbers by a handful (and Kindle Locations would be thrown off even further).

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I would not cite from a converted eBook. It has to be in a publisher released format. [...] It would have to be an untouched retail ePub.

See Example #1 above. Even if it was "untouched", you have no idea which minor revision you have.

And an "untouched retail EPUB":

What if I have to strip the DRM? What if I purchased an EPUB from iBooks and I can't strip the DRM, so I can't get the EPUB into an ADE-based reader? That's touching the retail EPUB! (Not to mention, the ibooks EPUB might be different from the EPUB in other stores.)

What if the EPUB is being read on a non-RMSDK ereader? Does the page numbering on Kobo's KEPUBs follow ADE? What if I use a Readium-based reader?

What if, technically unsavvy user, tossed their untouched EPUB into Calibre. They then used Calibre to push to the Kobo. What if *GASP* Calibre helpfully did some tweaks to the EPUB for them, so it displays properly on their device. They would be none the wiser.

What if you use something like Kindle Unpack on your Amazon-purchased MOBI? That's altering the file!

And then look to the future, let's say 20 years from now. What happens when I purchase my ebook in XYZ format? XYZ format does not use ADE's page numbering scheme. Should I convert XYZ->EPUB using Calibre, because ADE is the one and only TRUE way to cite ebooks?

According to your own rules, you CANNOT alter the purchased ebook. Then how do you recommend citing the text in ebook format XYZ?

Side Note: Or if you don't like my abstract format XYZ, then pick an old format, like any of the books in the LRF + IMP + LIT section of MobileRead.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I would never buy an eBook from Amazon I might want to cite. The ADE page number would be off.

Millions of other people purchase and read non-EPUB ebooks, and millions of people read in non-RMSDK/ADE readers. You can't just try to force JSWolf's personal preferences down everyone else's throats.

More broad, format-neutral citation is superior, because it works across all the different formats (Hardcover, Large Print, PDF, HTML, EPUB, MOBI, XYZ, [...]).