There was a discussion of Kindle citation on Humanist recently, in which I expressed a view similar to Barbara's and someone corrected me, saying that locations are indeed consistent across devices (as long as the edition is identical). For the Humanist thread, start with http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2010-August/001482.htm...
Cheers, Sharon who reads Kindle-format texts only on Android
On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Barbara Bordalejo wrote:
Kindle locations are assigned automatically and they correspond to a predetermined number of characters. A particular word in a particular book, has a particular location independently of the font size (I just checked this). I only have one of my Kindles here, so I cannot check the consistency from system to system, but I suspect (and hope) that this would not vary. Locations vary, however, depending on the edition (in the same way that printed books have passages in different pages in different editions). A full bibliographic entry with the Kindle location should be enough for referencing purposes.
BB
On 6 Oct 2010, at 21:40, Patrick Gardella wrote:
At this point, there is no way to reference one specific location. Locations provide a way for Kindles, but the Locations will vary depending on the font size in use. So it will provide the individual with a way to reference something for themselves, but not for anyone else (arbitrary bookmarks that might come close to canonical).
This is one of the largest problems with ebooks and ereaders for scholarly work. Some body will need to define the standards for footnoting, and doing cross-references. To date, I have no heard of any such standards in the works. Perhaps others have.
Patrick Gardella Annapolis, MD
On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:27 PM, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:
Hi all,
Good question from a student: if she is referencing a specific passage in a book on a Kindle that (apparently) has no pages or paragraph numbers, what does she do? She says Kindle has something called "locations" but it isn't clear to me if these are canonical or more like arbitrary bookmarks from how she is describing them (I don't have any ereaders, and so don't know).
Anybody know what you are supposed to do? I guess she could count paragraphs if it was that important, or, as with a very long webpage, just skip providing a location more precise than the entire work on the theory that you could full-text-search for it.
-dan