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<p>Most scholars in the humanities avoid using e-books for research. The difficulty is mostly citation—one immediately runs into problems when quoting digital editions, and the solutions proposed by MLA and other major arbiters of style are inelegant at best.</p>
The primary difficulty lies in determining page numbers. When working from a scanned book, essentially a facsimile of the print edition, finding a page number is not a problem, since pages are of a uniform size across devices and display modes. But flowing text file formats such as .mobi and .epub do not generally display standardized page numbers. Instead, page numbers differ based on font, screen size, text size, and myriad other factors. The result is that every user sees different page numbers, and these numbers are therefore useless in citation.
MLA recommends that writers use other markers, such as chapter heading, instead of the page number in parenthetical citations and bibliographies. Besides its imprecision, this solution also lacks a certain aesthetic appeal. It’s a stop-gap fix, and the lack of a proper method of e-book citation leads most academics in the humanities to prefer print books to e-books when conducting serious research.
Yet there is some hope for those who wish to continue using e-books for writing and research. Here are two workarounds for quoting digital editions:
Google Books Wordaround
This method involves taking the quote you’ve found in an e-book and tracking down the corresponding print location using the search function in Google Books. First, navigate to Google Books and enter the name of the book you wish to quote. Pick a print edition of the book from the resulting list, if available. Next, copy a snippet of the text you wish to quote and paste it into the small search field on the left side of the book description. This should bring up the page in the print edition that corresponds to your quote, and you can then use that page number in an in-text citation. Finally, construct a bibliography entry based on the print edition of the book rather than the digital edition.
The advantage of this method is that it results in a precise page number and a standard MLA print citation. However, it also adds an extra step in the citation process and it works only for the books that have been digitized by Google. Some scholars also find this process a bit disingenuous. Their reasoning is that if you use an e-book in your research, your bibliography should reflect that, and that switching between the forms can introduce discrepancies. However, my feeling is that Google Books allows one to check for differences between print and e-book editions before including a quote in your writing.
Kindle Position
If you’re using the Kindle edition of an e-book, you can quote Kindle Position instead of page number. If you have a book open in your Kindle desktop application, simply copy the text you wish you quote and paste it into your word processing program or web app. The pasted text should show the Kindle Position(s) for the text you selected.
This method is more precise than the MLA’s proposed solution of citing chapter headings, but it has its own problems. Many scholars aren’t familiar with Kindle editions, so your citation might stand out as odd to colleagues or peer reviewers. On the other hand, if you’re working in the digital humanities or a field related to technology, Kindle Position might be viewed as an acceptable alternative to page numbers.
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