Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
I don't understand why a page number is needed for that. You cite someone's words, stating his/her name and the book title, isn't that enough? (I'm not talking about the possible publisher's/editor's requirements.)
When the only available edition is electronic, you can say Sam E. Author wrote "This is not possible", and anyone can (or should be able to) search the book to instantly find the "This is not possible" sentence.
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Here's a page that lists several examples of AMA-style citations. Of course, different styles vary, but these tend to cover most of the bases.
Ones to pay attention to are Chapter from a Book and Journal Article, because for those, you list which pages contain the relevant chapter or article. However, at the same time, you'll notice that they have a style for Online Journals or Articles Without Page Information. These work by using a DOI (digital object identifier), a persistent URL-like identifier that should always resolve to an online version of the article. This is better than listing a URL because it allows sites to redesign/reorganize their material (or be bought by someone else, etc) while still allowing that DOI to point to the article (it's basically an abstraction of the URL concept). So ideally the DOI will still be relevant in 10-15-20 years' time.
DOIs were created specifically to track different versions and editions of
any type of digital object, including ebooks. The only thing I'm aware of that it doesn't take into account is the Chapter from a Book example, but I'm sure a solution there can be found, too. Just off the top of my head, one solution is as follows: The second portion of a DOI (after the /) is generated by the creator/publisher using whatever schema they choose. They could simply have a general DOI for the book itself, then add -1, -2, -3 or something similar and have sub-DOIs for each chapter.