On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com> wrote:
My question to the pagination-preservers is: what is the difference?
Pagination is crucial if you're talking about the text to someone else -- whether in a scholarly context, or just referring to a certain passage when writing a review. If you say, "Nina is called a gypsy on page .89 of the 1899 edition", someone else can find the passage and check your assertion. If you say, "Somewhere in the first third of the book, Nina is called a gypsy," people won't be able to find it. Even if you are reading on a device that does search easily, you'd still have to pull up and scour all mentions of gypsies. Pagination isn't a perfect reference method. If you're in a class where they're reading Gaskell's North and South, say, and the teacher is referring to a modern reprint and you've got an ebook version of the first edition, with the first edition pagination, you're going to have to do some searching. You'll probably find what you want within a range of a few pages, however. The best method is the one used for religious texts: giving chapter and verse. That reference is invariant across all versions. Perhaps we'll adopt that eventually for ALL texts. Until then, pagination is a next best. -- Karen Lofstrom