Just recently Amazon announced that, in an upcoming update to the Amazon Kindle software, books on your Kindle device will soon have page numbers. At which point thousands of students and academics around the world rejoiced. Why? Let me explain.
The Amazon Kindle, for all of its benefits and positives as a device, has included a rather baffling ‘location’ system on each page, rather than standard page numbers. When reading an eBook the zoom setting that you apply does, of course, affect the amount of pages that you have read, and Amazon clearly felt that scrapping page numbers in favour of ‘Locations’ would avoid any confusion. However, the rival eBook format, ePub, does include page numbers that, regardless of the zoom setting on your device, displays consistent page numbers at the relevant points. The question is, why does this matter, and why are Amazon now changing tack to introduce fixed page numbers?
There may be a few reasons, but the most obvious one relates to two specific demographics; students and academics. For those trying to use Kindles to read academic texts, or any books that would be cited in an essay or publication paper, it was impossible to do so. A key tenet of academic work is that your arguments must be supported, and any use of written material must be fully and accurately disclosed, allowing the reader to look up a point of reference if possible. This couldn’t be done with a Kindle book, because there was no way to cite a location of a quotation while providing an accurate reference point, a page number. Once academic citation conventions allow, the use of Kindles, following the inclusion of page number, may start to spread amongst students and academics.
Why this simple step has taken so long is confusing, but with one update Amazon will be broadening the appeal of the Kindle. Perhaps there will be long term ramifications for publishing in the Academic sector, we shall see.
Until next time, all the best.
Thomas
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