Library Journal thinks you're too dumb to handle endnotes
So my book has just gotten its first real review, in Library Journal (you have to scroll down through six other reviews to get to it.) It's by Robbie Allen of St. Johns River Community College in Palatka, Fla., and it's pretty positive. But then you get to the final sentence:
The style here is journalistic, with personal stories that make the book entertaining, but ultimately this is a history of academic thought—complete with endnotes—and is best suited for students of finance or people interested in financial theory.
I can't complain too much: I always saw economics and finance students as a fallback audience for the book, and I wrote and documented it in a way that I hoped would make professors feel okay about assigning it to their classes. But that phrase "complete with endnotes" gets me. Are lay readers really incapable of reading books with endnotes?
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1
I skip the endnotes, unless they are entertaining. I'll let my students tell me if they are.
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2
Endnotes are Tina-Fey-sexy. This guy is probably against indexes and tables of contents, too.
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3
I prefer footnotes, and use them in my books. I find endnotes to be a 'chore.' It's far more convenient for the reader when the footnote is on the same page - and isn't that what's important?
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4
Endnotes are proof that the book is worth reading. (Nearly all classical works of literature now are published in editions replete with endnotes ... proof positive.)
Who reads the Library Journal, anyways?
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5
As a reader rather than a writer of books, I'm going to lodge my vote for endnotes. I much prefer to have the option of flipping to the back to check out the extra info if I want to rather than having it sitting distractingly beneath the main text (possibly this is a sad indictment of how easily I can be distracted - I blame Wikipedia and the hours of fascinated but aimless clicking it encourages...)
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