The Real Importance of Steve Cohen and Brad DeLong's New Book | Capital Gains and Games: 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: http://www.cohen-delong-influence.com. However, there is nothing at this address because the references are actually found here:
http://delong.typepad.com/notes_to_the_end_of_influ/ 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.
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