"Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library." ~Nicholson Baker

October 11, 2011 6:21 AM

Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote? [NYTimes.com] _{1. Short answer: "Yes" with an "If," long answer: "No" -- with a "But."}
posted by Fizz (49 comments total)

Here's your 'Haphazard Simpsons Reference of the Day' prize.
posted by spamguy at 6:28 AM on October 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

WOW! I opened up my browser to diagnose a problem I'm having clicking footnotes in my Android Kindle app, and what do I see but this post at the top of the page?
posted by cthuljew at 6:33 AM on October 11, 2011

The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom.

Yet another reason to hate (current) ebook platforms! When exactly do you breathe when you are reading this 15 mile long page?

A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.

When I read this FPP, I assumed the answer was going to be "yes, because with the ability to link to Wikipedia, footnotes are moot" and my reply was going to be "but what if I'm not online?"

Instead, I find that ebooks are, once again, going to offer fewer features than paper books, not more. I can't put what I want on there or use it how I want, $BIGCORP can surveil and censor what I'm reading, it costs more, I can't share well, it needs batteries and is unwise to use in the tub or give to children. Plus it contains less information. Why again? And what is so hard about doing this right?
posted by DU at 6:40 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

This seems silly to me. It's only a matter of time before ebooks adopt some footnote format that pops up the footnote with a mouseover or click that is way more convenient than how footnotes work on a printed page.
posted by snofoam at 6:42 AM on October 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

Making my way through Pale King by David Foster Wallace on my Kindle was a particular nightmare. It became so annoying that I just read all of the footnotes at once and then went back and read the chapter proper. There has to be an easier way, not sure why it's being made to be such a difficult thing. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, no wait, that cannot be right.
posted by Fizz at 6:43 AM on October 11, 2011

i wonder if "international talk like david f wallace day" is an idea
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 6:45 AM on October 11, 2011

And if you grep this page for "footnote" you'll find that "ebooks" are not killing footnotes, Kindle is.
posted by DU at 6:46 AM on October 11, 2011

I don't understand why the Kindle doesn't have a footnote feature that works like their excellent dictionary feature, as a sort of pop-up at the bottom or top two lines of the screen, that you can click "ok" on for more.

I recently reread DFW's Consider the Lobster on my Kindle, though, and it was far less annoying to click between endnotes and main text than I thought it would be.
posted by Casuistry at 6:46 AM on October 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

I agree that in printed text, endnotes suck and no one reads them, but on the Kindle the endnote is a hyperlink. To read it, all I need to do it click on it; it's not hard, and I usually do. If these people aren't bothering to click on the endnote on an e-reader, why are we assuming that they would bother to read a footnote at the bottom of a page?

Also, this obviously applies to books with a reasonable number of footnotes, David Foster Wallace is another animal entirely.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:47 AM on October 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

Having just gotten the newest discworld book on my kindle. The footnote issue has come to the fore yet again. I really don't understand why the Ebook formats can't have a 'footnote' tag that places that text at the bottom of whatever page it happens to fall onto. There are some issues where adding the footnote would push it's reference off the page, but then you just put it on the next page. It's much easier to page forward than back than to use the cursor to scroll to the footnote, go to another page, and then have to go back. It really breaks the flow of the humorous footnotes.

on preview, Casuistry's suggestion would work well, though not necessarily for all ereaders
posted by TheJoven at 6:47 AM on October 11, 2011

Yeah, Infinite Jest was tough to read on the Kindle.
posted by Dr. Zira at 6:48 AM on October 11, 2011

To read it, all I need to do it click on it; it's not hard, and I usually do. If these people aren't bothering to click on the endnote on an e-reader, why are we assuming that they would bother to read a footnote at the bottom of a page?

It is not so much difficult, it is just annoying. And I have no problem turning to the back of a book to reference the endnotes on a DTB. I just expected something a bit more simple on my Kindle.
posted by Fizz at 6:51 AM on October 11, 2011

This is yet another problem that lies with Amazon used the outdated mobipocket format. Sure, it ties their customers into the Kindle platform which is great for Amazon, but it also means that they get a sub-standard reading environment in a number of ways, lack of proper footnotes being one of them.

You can implement footnotes on mobipocket files as pop-up "tool-tip"-style windows, which is at least slightly better than turning them into endnotes. The downside of doing that is that you probably can't search them, as the text is contained within a tag attribute.

Having said that, proper footnotes in ePubs relies on an Adobe extension to the standard, so that's not exactly reliable either :(
posted by pharm at 6:53 AM on October 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

i wonder if "international talk like david f wallace day" is an idea

It's an idea, although I favor "International Talk Like David Foster Wallace if David Foster Wallace Was a Pirate Day" somewhat more.[1][2]










1. I do not actually favor this idea all that much{3}
2. Although it would annoy several different groups of people[4]
3. Interview with GenjiandProust. Personal. 11 Oct. 2011. Accessed via Complete Fabrication. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.
4. ibid.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:58 AM on October 11, 2011 [9 favorites]

And ebooks handle poetry lines badly which makes me really despair the poem I recently wrote that has footnotes explained with more poetry.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:02 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well, yeah, GenjiAndProust, you know, I can conceptually engage with you on that level, but you have got to include repeated instances of code-shifting in your pastiche or it's just gonna come off as stale and dead.
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:05 AM on October 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

[1] The usual term is "code-switching". Why T.O.C.A.T.Y. chose to use the modified form in this passage is unclear.
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:07 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

it costs more

That depends on your preferred method of acquiring e-books.
posted by Trurl at 7:08 AM on October 11, 2011

3. Interview with GenjiandProust. Personal. 11 Oct. 2011. Accessed via Complete Fabrication. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.

God, that's even better than my version¹. Seriously ².




1. Rectally Selected, 11 Oct 2011, Chicago IL
2. ibid.

posted by eriko at 7:19 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I hate endnotes in DTBs, and I hate that all footnotes are de facto endnotes on ebooks. I hate that lots of books are formatted such that they don't have the right "jump back to text" links at the end of the endnotes. Hover tooltips, display at the bottom of the screen, whatever, just please figure out a way to have a footnote appear on my ereader (non-Kindle).
posted by jeather at 7:22 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Actually, having poked about the mobipocket spec, it looks like you might be able to use slave-frames to implement proper footnotes. I'll have to give it a try†.

†Googling for "mobipocket slave-frame" doesn't give the boring links on e-book authoring that I was looking for strangely enough.
posted by pharm at 7:30 AM on October 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Hyperlinked endnotes still suck. Not as much as normal endnotes, but enough.
posted by adamdschneider at 7:30 AM on October 11, 2011

It's been awhile (my Kindle reading has been dominated by George R.R. Martin for several weeks, who maybe needs to learn to use more endnotes), so I can't remember whether or not clicking on endnotes messes up your "last page read" sync. If so, that is another major suck point.
posted by Dr. Zira at 7:35 AM on October 11, 2011

The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.”

Finally, an end to this new-fangled page-based codex format that's been slicing fine literature into arbitrarily Procrustean chunks since late antiquity; at last, the Kindle promises us a true return to the scroll… Cicero had no need for footnotes! (Or maybe he did: I've never read any Cicero—and I'm wondering now how the digressive authors of early antiquity got by? did they use endnotes or marginal notes or interlinear notes or just put everything parenthetically in the text?)
posted by misteraitch at 7:37 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I had trepidations about my new Kindle when I got it last X-mas - until I downloaded and read a Pratchett novel. Footnotes still work.

I wish they'd open up in a re-positionable pop-up window rather than take you to another page, tho.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:46 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I like to pop-up window idea. The back-and-forth endnotes bit is tiresome and doesn't always work. But a pop-up window is genius.
posted by grubi at 7:49 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, Infinite Jest was tough to read on the Kindle.

Corrected.
posted by Fizz at 7:50 AM on October 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Oh, I'd love the shit out of pop-up windows for endnotes!

My (non-Kindle) ereader has a touchscreen, so navigating between pages is not terribly arduous. I don't resent having to tap something to see something. But man, endnotes that were right there on command would be the very greatest, and now I am grumpy that ebooks do not already have this feature.
posted by bewilderbeast at 8:00 AM on October 11, 2011

I hate doing endnotes on Metafilter¹. You have to wait 30 days to post 'em.
posted by bonehead at 8:35 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

The actual reasons, as opposed to the theorizing and “I don’t see why they can’t do X” in this thread, are:

• There is no footnote or endnote element in HTML. E-books are, in one guise or another (including XHTML 1.1 in ePubs), HTML. HTML5 and ePub3 do not completely solve this absence of document semantics, and even if they did, we’re talking about the future, not the present.
• It is difficult to determine (perhaps by definition impossible) where a “footnote” should be positioned in a pageless medium. Nor is it clear what the user interface should be. (There are excellent arguments against any kind of popup or windoid.)
• Publishers do not provide semantically correct E-books in the first place (rare artisanal counterexamples like A Book Apart excepted). They can’t even get character encoding right. Publishers are provably unable to succeed at HTML basics; something HTML cannot actually do is by definition something publishers are never going to provide.

posted by joeclark at 8:56 AM on October 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

and my reply was going to be "but what if I'm not online?"

In a generation that is going to be a hopelessly quaint concern: people in primary school right now will view a lack of internet service like we view a power outage: essentially everything stops until things get repaired again.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:03 AM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Although I've not bought it, so I don't know how well it works, Infinite Jest is actually being sold as an app in the iOS app store, so one would hope they've got the footnote problems sorted out.
posted by Grangousier at 9:12 AM on October 11, 2011

I'm reading Infinite Jest on the sony ereader right now, and it's been fine. About 600 pages in, hyperlinked endnotes which seem to me more convenient than actual endnotes...
posted by kaibutsu at 9:39 AM on October 11, 2011

Does this mean we're not going to see an ebook edition of The Dunciad: With Notes Variorum any time soon? Part of the joke depends on pagination--the overwhelming footnotes ("remarks") vs. the poem itself, which is sometimes reduced to one or two lines of verse per page.

Anyhoo, as an academic, I find endnotes exasperating (flip, flip, flip), and wouldn't at all mind tooltips.
posted by thomas j wise at 9:47 AM on October 11, 2011

The audio version of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell treated the vast number of footnotes in the book with art and grace and shows how it is possible to transform footnotes into a non-print medium.
posted by mfoight at 9:54 AM on October 11, 2011

I had to give up on reading Pratchett and Mary Roach on my e-reader because of the footnote issue. No big deal--footnotes wreak havoc on my ADD-led brain anyway.
posted by elsietheeel at 10:03 AM on October 11, 2011

When exactly do you breathe when you are reading this 15 mile long page?

The usual places: scene breaks or the end of a chapter. Pages are removed (sort of and only with certain e-readers), but formatting to indicate a scene change (blank space between paragraphs, for example) is not. And neither are chapter numbers/titles.
posted by asnider at 10:08 AM on October 11, 2011

Death to footnotes and endnotes. APA 4 LYFE!! [throws APA gang sign]
posted by fuq at 10:46 AM on October 11, 2011

Touch makes all the difference. Infinite Jest on my Nook Touch was vastly preferable to the multiple-bookmark system required to read that book on dead tree. I am more likely to read endnotes in a random piece of non-fiction than I was before I got an e-reader.
posted by zjacreman at 10:58 AM on October 11, 2011

joeclark: The actual reasons...

Except that those aren't quite the actual reasons; there's no particular reason why eBooks need to be HTML, especially if HTML hasn't figured out semantic markup for footnotes after this many decades of development.
posted by Casuistry at 11:36 AM on October 11, 2011

Dear ebooks,

See the Android pull-down notification bar? Have one of those appear at the bottom of any page with a footnote. Pull it up, read the footnote, push it down again.

Ta.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 12:06 PM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

There is no footnote or endnote element in HTML. E-books are, in one guise or another (including XHTML 1.1 in ePubs), HTML. HTML5 and ePub3 do not completely solve this absence of document semantics, and even if they did, we’re talking about the future, not the present.
posted by joeclark at 10:56 AM on October 11

You put in a hyperlink to "book.html#endnote1" and then you create a "endnote1" tag where you want the endnote to be. You already have to do this for the menu, in order to tell the Kindle where the cover, table of contents, etc., all are. I haven't tried to publish a book with endnotes yet, but don't see any reason they'd be this prohibitively difficult to create a workaround for.

It's this "there's no element named what I want to do" kind of thinking that has led to many publishers telling me they can't have poetry with lines that indent when they're too wide for the screen. I am about to publish a book of poetry with long lines, and I figured out how to workaround the supposed limitations by getting creative with what the html elements do, rather than what they're named.
posted by joannemerriam at 12:07 PM on October 11, 2011

I'd imagine that once the ebook publishers stop being twits that ebooks will be part of a renaissance in footnotes, etc.

At heart a footnote or an endnote is just a primitive hyperlink. And if there is one thing that electronic formats do well it's hyperlinking.

Modern ebook publishers are just doing it wrong. What we need is a popup (god that was painful to type, but it's true). The current approach of hyperlinking to a bunch of endnotes at the back of the book, with a hyperlink back to where you came from is obnoxious no doubt. But in the long run I think we'll find foot/end notes exploding in electronic texts.
posted by sotonohito at 1:09 PM on October 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I tried to read an epub of Frankenstein on my Wifi Nook, but gave up out of frustration. A footnote would be hyperlinked, and when I pushed the button, the footnote page would come up, but sometimes that was encoded wrong, and I'd need to backtrack a few pages...I can't even describe just how wrong it all was. Granted, my Nook is--at a year and some months old--already a dinosaur as far as ereaders go, so maybe the newer versions can handle annotations better.
posted by zardoz at 3:20 PM on October 11, 2011

I'd think that things like DFW novels and House of Leaves would be easier to read digitally. Couldn't you open the footnotes in a new tab?
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 3:42 PM on October 11, 2011

If you get your books in formatted PDF just a like an actual book page, then this is not an issue. And those PDFs can also be much less expensive to obtain *wink wink*.

E-ink will have to get much better refresh rates before popups and dynamic features become useful.
posted by Chekhovian at 4:09 PM on October 11, 2011

Yet another reason to hate (current) ebook platforms! When exactly do you breathe when you are reading this 15 mile long page?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe at the end of a paragraph?
posted by erniepan at 2:26 AM on October 12, 2011

A spokesman for the Kindle

(Cue visual image of a giant Kindle smoking a cigar in a murky penthouse office at midnight, silhouetted by the Moon as it surveys its holdings below.)

At heart a footnote or an endnote is just a primitive hyperlink.

Maybe some footnotes (legal footnotes, academic footnotes-that-should-really-be-inline-citations), but not all. This snappy hyperlinked version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall is so ugly that it could make small children cry. A well-designed print version of the book, on the other hand, is like a warm bath.

If I went around saying "Eh, comics are just images and text, so there'll be no big loss if we replace the standard comic format with a plain-text script with hyperlinks to non-lettered images," you'd think I was nuts. The literary footnote deserves the same respect.
posted by No-sword at 4:16 AM on October 12, 2011

there's no particular reason why eBooks need to be HTML, especially if HTML hasn't figured out semantic markup for footnotes after this many decades of development

While you wait, all by yourself, for a superior format to come along, millions of E-books will continue to be produced in flavours of HTML, as they always have been. It’s a fait accompli.

Joanne Merriam, you act as though people haven’t tried your hyperlinked method before. How exactly does it work in an 11,000-word unpaginated chapter with dozens of footnotes?

My statements were correct.
posted by joeclark at 6:15 AM on October 20, 2011