Liz Castro’s blog “Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis” performs a stellar service to the evolution of the book by focusing the spotlight on how EPUB 3 supports footnotes in ebooks (with a snippet from Dave Cramer‘s EPUB 3 version of Moby Dick) and providing many other insights into the making of books.
Castro’s post should remind us of Anthony Grafton’s book The Footnote: A Curious History, which delves entertainingly into the origin of this historical nonlinearity of the page. Several of his other books are noteworthy for making us think about the “text.”
If only Harvard University Press would spring for an EPUB 3 version of The Footnote, the trufflers of the history and future of the book could be in pig heaven!
Books On Books 