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For example, according to the manual's Web site, a copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice accessed on a Kindle might be cited as: "Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), Kindle edition." New Technology, New Rules The keepers of official citation style can find it tough to decide which new technologies need special rules. The staying power of a new digital-book platform or online service is unpredictable, Ms. Saller says, so the Chicago editors struggle with whether to craft guidelines for specific systems. When they started drafting the latest edition of their style manual, three years ago, they decided not to include Twitter-specific citation rules, because they were not sure if the medium would survive. Since then they have received numerous questions, mostly from high-school and college students, about how to cite tweets. Many scholars remain unaware that major guidebooks have added rules for e-books at all. "I don't think people have absorbed the fact that we have addressed the issue," says Ms. Saller. The American Psychology Association's guidebook, like Chicago's, suggests listing section and paragraph numbers or section titles when quoting e-books that lack page numbers. "It is a little unwieldy, but it's the best option we have been able to come up with that transfers across platforms to get the reader back to the source the writer used," says Jeff Hume-Pratuch, an editorial supervisor at the APA. Scholars who are familiar with such citations agree that the current formats remain unwieldy. Some academics improvise to help alleviate that burden. Joseph Reagle, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia, has worked with e-books in researching the Internet communities he writes about. "I struggled with it a lot as I was doing the scholarship myself and thought, 'I don't want to put anyone else through this,'" he says. When Mr. Reagle published Good Faith Collaboration online, he numbered the sections and paragraphs of each chapter to help anyone who wanted to cite the digital text. Catching On at Colleges While those numbers may be effective landmarks, some fear that they may start to intrude on the text. "What I don't want is something that so gums up the whole text that I can't pay attention to the text anymore," says William Rankin, director of educational innovation and an associate professor of English at Abilene Christian University, which is experimenting with e-books in some courses. "What I want is something that lets me find something when I need to but also gets out of the way and lets me read." Roberto Tietzmann, a professor of film at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, cites Kindle books by inserting an "l," for location number, where the "p" of the page number usually is found, and using footnotes to explain what the "l" stands for. He uses e-books often, he says, because Brazilian publishers typically "release e-books more quickly than paper books." It is also easier to access an e-book than to wait for a paper version to arrive from the United States or elsewhere, he adds. "E-books are under debate, and meanwhile these rules are not stabilizedI adapted them out of common sense and previous rules," he says via e-mail.
Discussions of how to cite e-books, which have been heating up on some academic e-mail lists and in faculty lounges, appear to be evidence that the format is catching on at colleges. "I think digital books will be the main kinds of books teachers and students will be using," says Mr. Rankin, predicting that in about five years, there will be firm rules for citing e-books. He looks forward to a time when most reading is done digitally, and electronic links replace long descriptions of how to find each reference. "Citations have always been symbolic," Mr. Rankin says. "I don't think I need symbolic anymore. I want an actual link."