Footnotes
January 10th 2008 00:39
I began reading a book by Philip Jenkins at lunchtime today – God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis – and like so many books of its kind (readable by the layperson, but academic in its approach) the text littered with footnote numbers. Annoyingly, as is the current fashion, the notes are all collected together at the back, so if you’re really interested in seeing where a quote came from or more about the paragraph in question, you have to be constantly flicking back and forth. Keep footnotes where they belong, say I!
Anyway, it’s what’s in the footnotes that I actually want to mention here. Once upon a time – only a few years ago, in fact – footnotes referred you to other books or articles, all of which would be in hard copy somewhere. Or, as they used to say in the old days: on paper.
Every second footnote in Mr Jenkins’ book, however, refers you to a website address, an URL (which means a Uniform Resource Locator, apparently – though that makes me none the wiser). This would be fine, except that trying to copy URLs from a book, especially when they’re complex, isn’t easy. I can see the future of footnotes being this:
For details of footnotes please refer directly to our online footnote page. Due to the fact that many readers have complained about their inability to follow up footnotes easily, because they are online, we have decided to place all footnotes online. This means that any notes that refer to an online document can be much more easily accessed.
Sounds good to me. Except that now you’ll have to sit reading the book beside the computer, or laptop – unless you can manage to access them by some more mobile means.
Anyway, it’s what’s in the footnotes that I actually want to mention here. Once upon a time – only a few years ago, in fact – footnotes referred you to other books or articles, all of which would be in hard copy somewhere. Or, as they used to say in the old days: on paper.
Every second footnote in Mr Jenkins’ book, however, refers you to a website address, an URL (which means a Uniform Resource Locator, apparently – though that makes me none the wiser). This would be fine, except that trying to copy URLs from a book, especially when they’re complex, isn’t easy. I can see the future of footnotes being this:
For details of footnotes please refer directly to our online footnote page. Due to the fact that many readers have complained about their inability to follow up footnotes easily, because they are online, we have decided to place all footnotes online. This means that any notes that refer to an online document can be much more easily accessed.
Sounds good to me. Except that now you’ll have to sit reading the book beside the computer, or laptop – unless you can manage to access them by some more mobile means.
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