Blog book

Oddly, I am reading a book about blogs and blogging.

Now, I know this is inherently weird, but give me a break, I'm teaching a class next year and we're expected to use things like, uh, books.

It's not a bad book. It does rely pretty heavily on entries from people's blogs though--one chapter I'd already read online. But I'm not here to talk about the content. No, I'm going to talk about the interface.

The interface to this book sucks. First of all, it has endnotes. In this age of computerized typesetting, endnotes should be banned. The are so hard to use--flipping back and forth, having to use two bookmarks, forgetting the number of the note, or the name of the chapter you're in.

This particular book compounds the sin by simply listing its notes under chapter numbers. So one of the endnote pages looks something like this:

• Chapter 1
  
  • note 1
  
  
  • note 2
  
  
  • note 3
  
  


• Chapter 2

etc. etc.

What's the problem with this, you ask? Well, after you leave the first page of the chapter, how the heck are you supposed to remember the number of the chapter? It's not printed at the top of each page--the name of the chapter is. So not only do I have to flip to the end of the book when I want to read a note, I have to also flip back to the first page of the chapter to figure out where to look.

Fortunately, I've stopped looking at the notes in this book, because I've looked ahead, and they all consist solely of URLs. That's right--there is no explanatory text in the endnotes, just references to online material, thus making it nearly impossible to read this book when you're not near a computer. I'm sorry, but that's one of the reasons I got the book--so that I could read away from the machine.

harrumph. Pure laziness Perseus Publishing. Shame on you.

The final straw though, in Chapter 6 the text refers to a definition of a blog that was written in a blog entry. This reference then becomes Note 17, which is the URL to that particular entry. The pisser here, is that the entire blog entry that the note refers to is reproduced in its entirety, word for word, as chapter 4 of THIS SAME FRIGGIN BOOK! Didn't anyone read the book as they were producing it? Couldn't the note have said something like, oh, I don't know, see page 23?

note: I love the fact that Blogger's spell check constantly wants me to change blog to bloc, and bloggin to flogging. I wonder if this would sound more revolutionary if I accepted those substitutions.