[rogue_ronin]

Book citations are what they are for good reasons. Edition, publisher, publication city, page numbers -- all necessary in a world of paper books. And still necessary in a world of silicon and pixels.

The purpose is to help you navigate to the quoted phrases, and allow you to find the context for their use. They are the original hyperlink, structured to help you work with the available technology (physical libraries, card catalogs, paper books.)

If you're using a hard-coded format, like PDFs, it's going to make some sense to do exactly the same thing: the edition would be some standard size, likely, but the page sizes would vary between books and editions, just as paper books do. So you'd cite it in a very similar way.

Otherwise, for reflowable formats, you can only do some other sort of counting -- there are no pages unless we add an arbitrary, abstracted one. And that's just unnecessary effort. We count what is there, easy to access and obvious -- Sections, chapters and paragraphs. Structure, not markup. (Any page-based format is marking up the content, not structuring it. It's picking perhaps necessary, but arbitrary, groups of elements and calling them for display.)

Right now, because we're in transition, there is often no easy way to find the structural position. Thus we see the ridiculous example of having to print out a document to count the paragraphs.

The proper model is to have the device/software count it for us, and to make it easy to access that number, but not have it in your face. Current models of "page counts" in ebook readers do this, actually. It's just counting something impermanent (screen size divided by line/character size) or arbitrary (character count = abstracted "universal" page size).

All it takes is a little meta-info in the paragraph markup to become standardized. I expect that there are proposals -- look at the way ebook-viewer in Calibre does it, for instance. You just click a button, hover and up pops the info.

In fact, done properly, it would be possible to use this format for printed books as well -- the key being to find a way to make the count not annoy the reader. (Most of my ideas for this are wacky. Fluorescent, invisible ink, for instance!) Lawyers do it already, for their documents (even down to the line -- which ought to be the same as paragraphs in an ebook, actually, because line-broken paragraphs suck!)

Now that I think about it, plays and poems are often given line counts to help in locating cites, and they appear in the book. (Perhaps all books could have a lighter-printed per-chapter paragraph number close to the binding.)

To add a reason to the list of reasons for non-paged documents: I like the challenge of using the available tools (and they'll keep improving) to find ways to present text in a relative manner. By that I mean: can you make a presentable document that will resize and reflow, and still look good? Can you link images, text to each other in a dynamic, effective way? And can you make it function in a pleasing manner -- is it a pleasure to navigate? Is there a way to add a reading of the text by offering a new set of linkages? I like the feeling of flow and elegance when the book works well, and I can adapt it to my needs of the moment.

I don't see the page to the same detail that some folk do. I like it when someone has gone to the extra effort to make a page beautiful, but I'm only annoyed by the larger failures (spelling, broken paragraphs, text that is obviously mis-spaced, and the like.)

Printing, typography and page layout have had a few centuries to come to their current state. eTexts have basically been widely available since 1996. It's going to keep getting better and more beautiful.

m a r