On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 8:21 AM, Carlo Traverso <traverso@posso.dm.unipi.it> wrote:
The most important point however is that you cannot change how books are quoted in existing books since hundreds of years. Assume that you have a book A printed, say, in 1922, that quotes a standard edition of a book B in the standard way, with a page number. Assume that you have an e-copy of B and you are reading A. How can you find the reference unless you have kept page numbers in B?
Good point. Clearly we need to have both page numbers and chapter/verse notation, not displayed as a default (that would be distracting), but available to toggle on when needed. Though the "standard edition" may not exist for some of the books most often assigned in literature courses. If an instructor assigns _Moby Dick_, which must exist in dozens of editions, then which edition is to be considered standard? Are you going to force a student to buy the XXX edition if she has the YYY edition? If, writing a scholarly paper, you cite page numbers from YYY, they will not necessarily match the page numbers from XXX. Which is why canonical texts like the Bible and the Qur'an are given the chapter/verse treatment. -- Karen Lofstrom