With the emergence of ebooks, much controversy arose, not only in the market but also regarding product creation and how to create a product that, until then, had been done with pen and paper. Back in 2011, the New York Times published an article titled "Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote?" This article referred to footnotes , but beyond the text itself, it offered a harsh critique of the publishing profession and the ebook itself. Scott Berkun picked up this controversial article on his blog and further fueled the critical debate, focusing particularly on the role of the publisher . Footnotes have always been considered synonymous with links in electronic format, but has it always been so clear-cut? More than three years have passed since then, and the debate about whether to add links or represent footnotes remains relevant. The reason: has the development of the ebook focused on the business sector, rather than the professional one?
Footnotes = links
Before continuing, I'd like to make a point that's raised in both the article and Berkun's blog, though they don't delve deeply into the definition. First, we need to clarify what we mean by footnotes and whether they correspond to the current understanding of links. According to the Royal Spanish Academy (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 an HTML link, what we're doing is linking to a word or words and sending the reader to another ' text ' with its footnotes or 'links'. In other words, it's as if, when reading a book, instead of adding a footnote, we had to look up that word or idea in another book and continue successively until we finished the first link, then move on to the second, and so on. Reading a book this way would take at least five years. This is a problem that hasn't been completely solved because the page format in an ebook isn't yet standardized, so both a link and a footnote can be used.
Opinion
At first glance , this whole issue seems like a pointless argument, a geeky whim that makes little sense. However, one of the conclusions drawn by both Berkun and the author of the New York Times article is that the ebook hasn't killed, nor will it kill, the book; the ebook is killing the page. And until we realize this, we'll continue arguing about whether to include footnotes, links, or other digital accessories that enrich the reading experience but don't actually add anything. With all this in mind, I think it's time to predefine an ebook page—its size, font, line spacing, etc.—and stop focusing on such trivial matters as price or format. Don't you agree?