This morning, Forbes ran my review of The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money by University of California, Berkeley economists Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong (Basic Books, 165 pp., $22).
What I left out of the review is something I want to discuss here. Although Cohen and DeLong are first rate academics and their book is essentially written for a scholarly audience, one is struck by the fact that there are no footnotes or references in it. This is very uncommon for a book of this sort.
It turns out that the references do indeed exist, but only online. This brings me to the one really serious error in the book. In its lone footnote on page 2, we are told that the references exist at this web address: www.cohen-delong-influence.com. However, there is nothing at this address because the references are actually found here:
When I first checked the address in the book there was nothing there at all. Now, at least, there is a link taking people to the correct location of the reference material.
For some reason, the references are listed in reverse order, with the book’s final one listed first. Since there is no note in the text, readers are given a page and a bit of text from the book and told that the following book, article or document is the source for that statement. Some published books also use this system to avoid cluttering up books with footnotes, which publishers hate and consider distracting.
One benefit to the Cohen-DeLong approach is that it allows for actually working hyperlinks. I’m sure I speak for all writers who are frustrated by having to leave a long string of letters, numbers and characters as a printed footnote reference in hopes that someone looking for documentation can accurately type them all in to a computer properly and that the link hasn’t been broken in the meantime. Not only do Cohen & Delong avoid this problem, but presumably their links can be fixed as time goes by since their propensity to break and even disappear altogether is a very frustrating fact of life in the Internet age.
Elsewhere on their web site, Cohen and DeLong have places for errata, reviews and comments. The goal seems to be to seamlessly integrate a traditional paper-and-ink book with an interactive web site. While many books have web sites purely for marketing purposes, this is the first one I have seen that contains critical information central to the book such that the book is incomplete without it.
Having taken this important first step in the full integration of traditional and web-based publishing, I’m curious about how much further Cohen and DeLong are willing to go. For example, if there is a Kindle version of their book does it reintegrate their reference material in the text itself via hyperlinks, thus avoiding the necessity of going to the web page? I don’t see why this couldn’t be done, which eventually might make Kindle versions of scholarly books far more valuable than the traditional dead-tree versions.
I wonder how much money the publisher saved by leaving out all the footnotes and references? Since in good scholarly books a third of the text many be occupied by such material, presumably the savings are significant, allowing for a lower price on the print edition.
I also wonder whether Cohen and DeLong have plans to continually update their web site and references to take account of new material that either supports or contradicts their analysis and conclusions? If they do so, then at what point do they stop? When the book is out of print?
Finally, I wonder what Cohen and DeLong plan to do to preserve their supplementary web page for someone who may come across their book 100 years from now.
I bring all this up because I have thought about doing something like what Cohen and DeLong have done. I’m one of those writers who loves to expound at length in footnotes on fine points of interest only to experts. Unfortunately, at least with commercial publishers, these are the first to go when one’s editor gets the manuscript. In fact, footnotes and references of any kind are rapidly disappearing completely from trade books.
Part of this trend is pure cost pressure: shorter books, less cluttered books are cheaper and sell better. It also makes it less conspicuous that many best-selling authors today like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have no idea what they are talking about. With no need to document anything they say it’s much easier for them to get away with saying anything they please.
Scholars know better. Proper documentation is the cornerstone of the scientific method. It makes it possible for others to reproduce results, thus leading to the advancement of human knowledge. Without documentation everyone must reinvent the wheel for themselves, thus wasting time and inhibiting development. Yet the pressure to cut costs and edit out boring reference material threatens to either kill serious scholarly publishing or force books to be dumbed-down to worthlessness.
Therefore, I see Cohen’s and DeLong’s approach as a middle approach, a way of cutting costs while maintaining scholarship and perhaps even improving it. What is critically necessary, however, is a central repository for online reference material that authors can depend upon to be maintained indefinitely. Perhaps a consortium of publishers, including trade and university presses, could establish such a central web site on a nonprofit basis. Or perhaps Google could do it so that footnotes can be linked directly to its database of online books.
I also think publishers should understand that Kindle offers the opportunity to eliminate the cost of providing documentation and reference material that they now view as extraneous. Authors should be encouraged to add hyperlinks to Kindle editions that don’t merely cite chapter and page in some book, but links to photos, videos, audio and anything else on the Internet that will illuminate or support some point an author wishes to make.
Of course, there are inevitable copyright and other problems inherent in the full integration of print and the Internet. But I think Cohen and DeLong have taken an important first step in that direction.
Cut out references?!
Publishers seriously edit out references if you put them in? Wow, that's pretty ridiculous. Beyond just the 'scientific method', how are you supposed to verify controversial claims the author might make? Oh, wait, I forgot the truth isn't important when it comes to anything related to the political economy...
References
Don't get me started on the hell my last publisher put me through regarding my notes. If I ever write another book I will have it put into the contract that my notes must be publshed exactly as I wrote them with no editorial changes. I'm told that Thomas Sowell has a such a provision in his book contracts.
You might also want to retain control over the subtitle
I've read your book and and it is very good. Nevertheless the subtitle is misleading and insulting to a great President.
FWITW, My three principle take aways from your book were:
1. Your support for a VAT
2. The idea that while economists talk of new theories disproving the old, in actuality they evolve to fit the times so that a descriptive theory (and the solutions derived from it) that may have been valid in the 30s, 80s 90s may lose validity and effectiveness over time.
3. The economic policies (if one could call them that) of the Bush administration were NOT supply side and true supply side policies probably would not have been effective between 2000 and 2008 for the reason described above.
I am still not sure about the VAT idea but concede it has merit. I completely accept points 2 & 3 but also think the current administrations policies suffer from the same problem. They are not truly Keyensian and even if they were, Keyensian policies would be ineffective in the current environment.
Two-way footnote links
Good points. And for that matter, if a book can be hyperlinked to it's footnotes, then each book that is a footnote source can also display hyperlink references back to all the other books that reference it. For instance, if I'm reading one of your books Bruce, not only can I see what your sources are, I could see what other books reference your book. That in turn could open my world of knowledge beyond just your book.
Cohen & DeLong notes
Hi Bruce,
First, thanks for the review. It was terrific to see, especially something so thorough.
Second, we--that is, the publisher--didn't take out the notes. It was purely the authors' idea, mostly, I think, as a way of making the notes a "living document"--something that can be added to and expanded as time goes by, a way of buttressing the book's argument. It also meant that Steve and Brad had more time to gather and format their notes after they finished with the main text. (Both they and we felt that the sooner we got their book out, the better.)
At Basic, we very much straddle the divide between academic expertise and a wider "trade" audience; our existence is predicated on that position. Which is to say, we're most happy to have notes in our books. We publish experts, and we flaunt that fact.
If you're interested in keeping your (future) notes on line, I'd suggest you check out what David Friedman did with one of his books (either Law's Order or Hidden Order, I don't remember which), using different symbols in the book's margin to indicate different kinds of references on the web. Very inventive and useful.
And, finally, with the right team, editorial intervention can be a good thing!
Thanks again.
Best,
Tim Sullivan
Notes
Whoever had the idea, I like it PROVIDED that some system is put in place to make sure the notes can be found by future researchers and they are preserved in some way to ensure permanent access.
Incidentally, I should have mentioned the most extensive effort I know of to link references and documents to a published text: the amazing Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis companion to volume one of Allan Meltzer's history of the Fed:
http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/meltzer/sources.php
Act of footnoting - more important than where they're stored
Chris Rodda's Liars for Jesus has the book's footnotes also published at a website dedicated to the book, this site also provides links to images of primary source documents. Ms. Rodda's book is a rebuttal to the Christian Nation propaganda published by people like David Barton. Here's the link to the primary footnote homepage: http://www.liarsforjesus.com/footnotes.htm
Dr. James Hansen's book on anthropogenic global warming, Storms of my Grandchildren, does not foot- or endnote, in spite of much of its content being based on scientific findings and explanations. He instead provides far too few summary citations in the back sorted by chapter along with administrating a webpage where he hopes to keep charts contained in the book updated as time passes.
The print version of Esquire Magazine is also using image codes that allows your laptop or smartphone's camera viewer to retrieve whatever computer data this code is referencing off the web. I haven't used this myself, but supposedly one only needs to download some free software to make it work. I may not have explained this exactly right, but I believe it allows readers of print to easily retrieve information off the Internet. I bring this up since this would be a great way to footnote a print book, saving one from typing long URL addresses or navigating to the book's webpage of footnote links.
I have no problem with authors and publishers publishing footnotes on-line, in fact I support it like Ms. Rodda does since it makes the actual sources a mere click away if they're not behind a subscription firewall (where most information is not). My problem is when there is a scarcity of footnotes relative to the provocative assertions being leveraged but not cited.
Good Point
I suspect that some writers are fearful of providing adequate documentation for fear that their work will appear pedantic, boring and inaccessible to general readers. Perhaps if they could have all the documentation they like online then they might be more inclined to provide it.
QR codes for printed URL footnotes!
I've never seen this before, but this is probably what you are referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code
If you encode an URL in one of these, something like an Android will go right to that page when you point the camera at the code.
Online documentation is definitely the way to go.
The idea of flexible and extensible documentation, and even revised chapters at de minimus costs is irresistable.
Considering the rapid spread of Kindle type readers, it allows the possibility of reintegration of the notation and documentation in the MS itself when both are imported into the device.
My thanks to Bruce Bartlett for establishing this most interesting and timely discussion.
T. Lipscomb
The Annenberg Center of the Digital Future (USC)
I don't really get your
I don't really get your reasoning here, Bruce. Is your goal to write a book that changes minds, or to make the millions of dollars that we all know exist in the lucrative non-lunatic political science publishing field?
Because if your goal is simply to change minds, write your book exactly as you want to, and put it on the web as a freely downloadable PDF, with as many footnotes (including hyperlinks) as you want. If you also want such cachet as accrues from being publish by someone other than Regnery, let them tear it apart as they wish, subject to the proviso that your web PDF edition is allowed to remain on line.
Putting PDFs of your book online is not an uncommon model in the physics/math world. There are various flavors, from web PDF only publication, to web PDF + book, to weird dog-in-a-manger deals I don't see the point of, like the author's draft is on the web but the corrected/edited version (ie such labors as the publisher added to the document) is what is printed.
But complaining about how much the publishing world sucks when alternatives are trivially available makes no sense to me.