Ending useless endnotes

[yendi]

I'm reading David Graeber's generally excellent* The Utopia of Rules, and it's reminded me of a pet peeve of mine with much of the publishing industry.

Folks, I do not give a flying fuck what your style guide, your academic advisor, or anyone else says. If you have notes appended to the text that are digressions, additive text, anecdotes, or anything other than basic bibliographic information, they should be fucking footnotes. Period. Maybe, if you've got really short chapters, you can get away with using end-of-chapter notes. But fucking endnotes? Fuck that shit. Your work of pop academia is not a fucking Choose Your Own Adventure, and my reading experience should not include keeping my finger inserted between pages 234-235 so I can flip back and forth every time you want to make an aside.

I realize this is likely a publisher issue as much as anything else (and probably not the author's fault), but it is so fucking annoying. Usability is a concept that applies everywhere, not just in technology (where, incidentally, this is less of an issue generally, since services like Kindle can handle moving between notes and text gracefully).

*Although anyone who writes "ATM Machine" repeatedly deserves a solid whack with an LCD display.

Comments

[jadelennox]

COSIGNED.