What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page.
The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is, a “dead tree” version) whose footnotes are all at the end, rather than on the page they relate to. Annoying, because each time you reach one you have to flick forward a couple of hundred pages. Most of the notes, it’s true, are just source citations, giving no additional information. But the odd one is a ‘proper’ footnote, containing a juicy little fact or anecdote. Can’t risk missing those, can you? So you have to look up each and every note, just in case. Or, as I’ve started doing, scanning the notes each time I start a new chapter and trying to remember which ones are proper and which I can ignore. All very cumbersome.
Kindles, apparently, gather footnotes at the end of each chapter, rather than at the end of the book. Fewer pages to rummage through, but still irritating. (According to an Amazon reviewer of my latest book, anyway. He marked me down because of it. Ho hum.) Precisely how irritated you get will depend on how many footnotes a writer has included. After switching from novels to non-fiction I’ve probably overdone it a bit, falling prey to intellectual vanity. “Lo, I am finally writing books with footnotes in them! Surely the Professorship at Yale is only days away.” (Not that fiction has to be footnote-free – Mark Twain, John Fowles, Douglas Adams and Frederick Forsyth are among the many who’ve included them in their novels.) I haven’t gone as far as Alan Partridge, though; his new autobiography contains 285 footnotes.
Which is where e-readers come in. Or could do, if we got their design right. Note to Kindle and iPad boffins: can we have models that allow a number of different footnote options? Before you start reading you’ll select where you want them displayed, or indeed whether you want them at all. (I’d guess most people would — a note every now and then acts as a fag break for the concentration.) You could choose which categories of notes you want to see; the meaty ones that tell you what Mick Jagger said to Ted Heath at lunch, the academic ones that tell you which volume of History Today a statistic comes from, or both together. You could even choose whether you want numbers or — for when you’ve come over all A.J.P.Taylor — those old-fashioned symbols (star, dagger, and so on). By touching the relevant bit of the screen the note could pop up there and then, without you having to scroll down at all, never mind to the end of the chapter. All this could make a book’s essential job — telling you a story — so much easier to achieve.
Maybe the footnote won’t be a footnote in history after all.
Mark Mason’s latest book, Walk The Lines, is available on Kindle with all its footnotes.
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