… I thought it was note-worthy and maybe even important, so I assigned it to the small type at the bottom of the page.
Since typing that small type, I have received dozens of angry and concerned queries about the anecdote. Why had I fed her grapes? Did I not know they were toxic? After some back-and-forth, I was surprised to discover that these incredulous comments often came from readers of the electronic version of my book, where the footnotes are shunted off to the end of the text, relegated to being mere endnotes. If footnotes are at risk of going unread, endnotes are even more so.
All this is discouraging for a champion of footnotes like myself. The footnotes are among the first things I look at when I pull a book from a store shelf. My editor gamely tolerated my inclusion of many in my own book (though we removed more than we left in). I would be proud to be a footnote in someone else’s work. …
Ganzer Artikel: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/will-the-e-book-kill-the-footnote.html (via http://lisnews.org/will_ebook_kill_footnote)