WE HAVE A SOLUTION TO THIS, THEY ARE CALLED FOOTNOTES.
"COME OUT COME OUT AND FLIP TO THE BACK OF THE FUCKING BOOK AND SEARCH FOR THE TINY NUMBER. OH YOU HAVE A PDF? THEN FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING LIFE" - DERANGED SICKO PUBLISHERS
Under communism, endnotes will be banned and punishable by law.
Uphold forenotes. Flip through 75 pages of weird data and asides that makes no sense until you reach the back half of the book.
figures & plates at the FRONT, their RELEVANCE will be MURKY and you will FORGET by the time you read about it
My favorite thing about footnotes in when I turn a page and there is about 3 lines of text and 80 lines of footnotes. I forget if it was Rorty or Scialabba or whoever but I distinctly remember reading a bookform essay that was more footnote than essay.
I remember this happening when I read Hannah Arendt. I thought it was hilarious.
I can't remember which book it is but this is definitely an early PTerry bit.
My eBook reader (KOReader) converts endnotes to dynamic (pop-up) footnotes. Works almost all the time.
I do like that function. I can't highlight in the pop-up on my kindle, which is annoying. Only works with ebooks tho, and finding or citing things in ebboks is annoying as the page numbers get all weird. Location 4657????
more like Communism Style, coming to murder every single endnote and add it to the victims of communism memorial
I haven't read it. My partner ripped the book in half to make it easier to hold though lol
I'm just teasing :P
For what it's worth, I have ADHD so, by the time I've flipped to the back of the book to find the endnote I need, invariably one of two outcomes occurs:
- I forget which number I'm looking for and I end up reading the wrong
footnoteendnote and I spend a few minutes perplexed as I try to puzzle out the relevance to the main text before returning to the main text to realise that I've just read the wrongfootnoteendnote - I remember the number but what I've just read slips from my mind as I focus with all my effort on remembering the correct number, only to read the footnote and fail to connect that information with the main text and then I have to go back a page or two in order to remember the thread of the main text before encountering that same
footnoteendnote again
Wash, rinse, and repeat for the most infuriating experience as a reader.
Fuck
footnotesendnotesok yeah fuck that. won't argue about that, that shit has to be self-linked and shit to be even remotely acceptable.
Yeah I have the same experience. It's awful and slows me down so much, and I have to have two windows open with the same PDF if I don't have the book. I can't not know what the fucking note says. It's the worst in books where they decide that each chapter needs to restart the sequence. Then you have to find the chapter, and then search for the number. And at that point, I've forgotten the number or what the sentence with the note even said.
Those are endnotes though, footnotes are at the bottom of the page which is easy to find, read, and then go back to reading.
Lmao, did I mention that I have ADHD? I even got them the right way around in the first instance before I got distracted smh.
- I forget which number I'm looking for and I end up reading the wrong
infinite jest is my favorite novel, but i also enjoyed the novelty of having to use double bookmarks and being constantly reminded of the physical bounds of reading
Wait, it uses endnotes not footnotes? God damn, Foster Wallace was a sadist.
I've read some of his essays, he was a good writer. I may read infinite jest one day, my partner enjoyed it.
yeah, and the endnotes themselves are a trip. they're like a quasiacademic experiment in writing. i'm a big nerd so i enjoyed the pedantry of its formatting, but it also has a lot of interesting things to say about addiction and entertainment that remain extremely relevant today.
God damn, Foster Wallace was a sadist.
yea
it's such an ADHD ass book. why would i just go one page at a time, the narrative is in a big pile on the floor and i get to put it together like a lego set.
oh, you wanted a chronologically ordered narrative? fuck you, the years have names, the order is on a random page, fuck you for wanting to figure out how this fits together. it's like a big puzzle, and half the narrative doesn't even directly happen within the pages
or it was important enough that it should've been in the main text