Nobody could have foreseen this

by Cliopatria

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Albeit for very large values of 'nobody'. In 2006 I wrote the following, with regards to John Ramsden's Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890:

[...] what’s with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the 10 pages omitted from the book really improve its profitability by that much? It’s better than none at all, I suppose, but it does potentially diminish the book’s useability for research purposes, now and in the future. For shame, Little, Brown, for shame.

And of course, four years later the website no longer exists; the domain name is not even registered any more. It doesn't help that Ramsden died last year, so there's probably nobody looking after his electronic-academic legacy.

Luckily this is a trend which hasn't taken off -- at least not that I've noticed in recent book purchases. But Guy Walters at the Daily Telegraphdisagrees (citing Ramsden's website too, which floored me since his post seems to have gone up this very day!) He thinks that the practice of moving footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies from books to the web is becoming more common. I do hope he's wrong.

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Andrew D. Todd - 7/17/2010

I looked up Ramsden's footnote website on the Internet Archive, and I looked up my own website for comparison, so as to understand the meaning of the Internet Archive's statistics. My conclusion is that the footnote website had probably ceased to exist by the end of 2006. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Granted, that the domain was paid up until 2008, but the server may not have been. At any rate, the Internet Archive captured the notes, and they are available, as your correspondent "Sharon" at Air-Minded noted.

For what it is worth, the going rate for independent website hosting is something like a hundred dollars a year, when you include things like domain registration fees. Each year, you get more capacity, both in the form of storage and of download bandwidth, but the fee does not decrease. Now, of course, if you use a website properly, and post large quantities of stuff, the fee is not a big issue. However, if you are just using the website to post a supplemental leaflet for a book, it would almost certainly be cheaper to bind additional pages into a paper book and use small print. I don't know if you've ever used the old paper edition of the Social Science Citation Index, which was in use back in the 1980's, but they had print so so small that one needed a magnifying glass. It may well be the case that the author and publisher never agreed who was going to pay for the website, in which case it would have vanished when the annual fee became due.

Now, of course, a publisher which was competent in internet affairs would have provided a page for each book within a larger website, in which case, the maintenance costs would have been trivial. I suspect the publisher _really_ didn't want to publish footnotes, and manipulated matters to that end.

Brett Holman - 7/16/2010

I think something like that's a reasonable compromise, if (and only if) publishers are going to go down this route. Or maybe going to another third-party organisation would be better, such as HathiTrust; this might better safeguard academic concerns such as accessibility.

Jonathan Dresner - 7/14/2010

I wonder if writers whose publishers are attempting these kinds of cost-cutting measures could leverage Google's book project into an endnotes archive: submit to Google a special archival edition of the book with full endnotes, and a copyright waiver to post the entirety of the endnote section.

I know it's just moving the problem downfield, but it might be a better medium-term solution. For a long-term solution, make copies of the archival edition available to libraries and researchers who are willing to pay a bit more for the full apparatus.

Not sure publishers will go for this, but it's worth thinking about.