Don't blame the technology! I blame print culture, for convincing us that tying a piece of information to an absolute physical location is normal and necessary. The proliferation of devices and systems right now is just opening our eyes to the fact that this isn't the case.
I hope we'll ultimately move (revert?) to citing based on how the content is structured--chapter & verse, so to speak--rather than how any one device (including a particular edition of a book) displays it.
Paragraph, word, and/or character counters should be built into all epub readers and other tools used to display electronic publications! You'd still depend on your device to *tell* you the location, of course, but that's not the same as having the device *determine* the location. If the content remains the same from format to format and version to version, the 612th paragraph of chapter 10 should always be the same.
Not that this helps your student today.
On 10/6/10 5:08 PM, "O'Donnell, Dan" daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:
Of course this raises the problem of what kind of system is it where you've got to get the right delivery platform in order to find the reference, even if you have the same content on another platform. We never should have let them market PCs: it all went down hill from there.