| May 16th, 2012 |
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So, I'm reading a book. It's non-fiction. And it is annoying me, for one simple reason:
Endnotes.
I hate endnotes. To read an endnote, I have to hold my place with one finger, flick through the book to the endnotes section, finding it before the index and the bibliography and any appendices, find the chapter I'm on, find the number I'm up to - not actually knowing whether this particular endnote is going to be an interesting added point to read, or just "ibid." - and then find my place on the page I'm reading again.
And then I either have to keep repeating this process, or else I have to keep a finger uncomfortably holding my place in the endnotes section.
All of which could be averted by the simple use of footnotes, instead. To read a footnote, I just have to glance down the page.
I realise that, in a pre-computerised era, footnotes were probably quite a challenge of typesetting and layout. However, I pretty much just don't believe that the layout of a text-only work of non-fiction isn't done with software these days, and largely automatically at that. If OpenOffice can insert footnotes trivially, and automagically renumber them when I insert and remove them and so on, then I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that layout software can probably do that too.
There is no excuse for using endnotes. Endnotes are a crime against readers of nonfiction.
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