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LINGUIST List 21.1973

Sat Apr 24 2010

Disc: Citing E-books

Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssalinguistlist.org>

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        1.    Daniel Hieber, Citing E-books
Message 1: Citing E-books
Date: 22-Apr-2010
From: Daniel Hieber <dwhiebemail.wm.edu>
Subject: Citing E-books
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Until recently, e-books have been treated much like websites for the
purpose of citation and reference. The APA, for example, suggests listing
the book's DOI or place of retrieval instead of publisher information:

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success [Kindle DX version].
Retrieved from Amazon.com

Brill, P. (2004). The winner’s way [Adobe Digital Editions version].
doi:10.1036/007142363X

But e-books today are becoming more akin to traditional books. Amazon's
Kindle books, for example, have static 'location' numbers which can be
referenced in lieu of page numbers. Publisher and copyright information are
generally included as well. So my suggestion would be something like this
instead:

van Valin, Robert D. Jr. 2001. An introduction to syntax [Kindle book].
Amazon Digital Services: Cambridge University Press.

For inline citations, and particularly page references, I rather like APA's
guidelines for referencing materials without pagination, that is, to use
chapter, section, and paragraph numbers. They give the following example:

One of the author’s main points is that “people don’t rise from nothing”
(Gladwell, 2008, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 5).

I would personally rework this as follows:

One of the author’s main points is that “people don’t rise from nothing”
(Gladwell 2008: ch. 1, §2, para. 5).

I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

(Examples taken from the APA blog, which can be accessed here:
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/how-do-i-cite-a-kindle.html)


Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics



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