With the appearance of ebooks, a lot of controversy was born, not only at the market level but also when creating a product and how to create that product that until now was made with pen and paper. Back in 2011, the New York Times published an article titled Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote? An article that made reference to footnotes but beyond the text, there was a harsh criticism of the profession of publisher and the electronic book. Scott berkun picked up this controversial article on his blog and continued to give more weight to critical opinion, with special emphasis on publisher field. Footnotes have always been assimilated to the links in electronic form, but Has it always been so clear? More than three years of all this has passed and the controversy about whether to add links or represent the footnote is still valid, the reason: the development of the ebook has been focused on the business field or not on the professional one.
Footnotes = links
Before continuing, I would like to make a reflection that both in the article and in Berkun's blog they are done but they do not delve much into the definition. The first thing would be to see what we mean by footnotes and if they correspond to the current image of links. According to the RAE, a footnote is:
Warning, explanation, comment or news of any kind that in printed or manuscript goes outside the text
With this in mind, anything outside the text of the book would be a footnote or bottom of the page, but it would be a footnote. The majority trend has always been to put footnotes before the end of the book or text, since the former are more likely to be read than the latter.
So far many have followed this standard and created visual stand-ins for the e-book to indicate that it is a footnote. Others, more aware of what they were doing, have dedicated themselves to creating the typical html links that more or less come to mean the same thing, but are not really the same.
When we use a html link, what we do is link the word or words and send the reader to another 'text'with your footnotes or' links'. That is to say, it is as if when we read a book, instead of putting a footnote, we were to look for that word or idea in another book and continue successively until finishing the first link, then we would continue with the second and so on, we go that to read a book with this system we would need at least five years. This is a problem that has not been fully fixed as the page format in an ebook is not set yet, so a link and a footnote are worth both.
Opinion
A priori, this whole issue seems like a crude dispute, a geek whim which makes little sense, however one of the conclusions that he draws so much berkun as the author of the article New York Times is that the ebook has not killed or does it kill the book, the ebook kills the page and until we realize it, we will continue fighting over whether to put footnotes, links or other digital accessories that enrich the reading but that they do not contribute anything. I think with all this that it is time to predefine an ebook page, what size it should be, what type of font, line spacing, etc ... and put aside such banal things in the Long time such as the price or the format. Do not you think?