Davos Newbies Home

Footnotes please

I’m reading a wonderful book, The Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan. It’s about the Paris peace conference that followed the First World War and just about every page jolts the reader with some insight or pithy aside. Great stuff, and eerily relevant to today’s world situation.

But there’s one thing that annoys me profoundly, and I fear it’s a straw in the wind of the future of book publishing. For the paperback edition, publishers John Murray decided to dispense with the 46 pages of notes. In the book, they claim they agreed this with the author to “make the paperback a manageable and readable size”.

I don’t believe this. I think it was to save money on production. Would 50 additional pages on a 500-page book really make it suddenly unwieldy? When I’m reading a book as involving as The Peacemakers, I want to follow some of the references.

As a sop, John Murray direct the reader to their website for the references. Of course, nothing is signposted from the home page. The user has to guess that The Peacemakers will be under “general books”. They are there, in a pdf file, but printing out 46 pages at my expense and carrying it around with the book would be truly unmangeable. (And will it be available and signposted if I want to find the references in five, 10 or 20 years?) Publishers should stop this nonsense before it gets out of hand.

One thought on “Davos Newbies Home

  1. Brad DeLong

    I found that the true tragedy was when they moved the notes from the bottom of the page to the back of the book. That made looking at the notes a real pain–it was almost as if they had been moved to the far side of the moon.

    Brad DeLong

    Reply

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