Chad Orzel has been really kind to our book--but he hates the way we, and many others writing trade books, handle endnotes. Orzel's post on this matter, entitled "Death to the Un-Noted Endnote," can be found here. In it, he writes the following of our book and another by Tom Levenson:
While they have very different subjects...they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under 40 pages in Levenson's book, and a whopping 65-- nearly 50% of the length of the main text-- in Unscientific America. And not a single one of those notes is indicated in the text. They all start with a page number and a phrase from the main text-- for example, "87 "being rational is considered the opposite of being creative": Interview with Matthew Chapman, August 20, 2008"-- but are not indicated by a number or symbol on the relevant page. I hate, hate hate this. It's especially infuriating in Unscientific America, where the notes sometimes go on for multiple pages, and are critical to an appreciation of the main text. (Levenson's notes in Newton and the Counterfeiter are mostly confined to the sourcing of particular bits of information, with occasional discussion relating to the interpretation of ambiguous source material.) Reading the book without reading the endnotes lessens the book-- by almost 33%, in fact-- but the lack of symbols or numbers in the main text forces the reader to be some sort of literary telepath, able to intuit when the authors want to make additional remarks. Or if you're a mere mortal like myself, you end up going back at the end of the chapter and reading through all the notes at once, making for a very disjointed reading experience.
Okay: We need to clear some things up. First, I have always called these notes that Orzel is referrring to "trailing phrase notes," rather than "un-noted endnotes," though the phenomenon is the same. The reason for its existence, I surmise, is the fear that some readers will be intimidated if, browsing in the bookstore, they see endnote numbers in a book's main text. They'll think they're getting a dense academic read, when that's not what they went looking for. So the thinking is that you give them additional content in the back of the book, but you don't litter the main text with superscripts. Hence, the "trailing phrase note"--or whatever you want to call it. But let's next address why we used so many in Unscientific America. Working with the publisher, we decided to slash the book's original textdown dramatically in length, from on the order of 70,000 words to more like 40,000 in the main body of the text. These twoessays about C.P. Snow, published individually, were once the backbone of a chapter that no longer appears in the book. And as for much of the other stuff that got cut? We moved it to the endnotes. Why? Well, on the one hand it was valuable and relevant material that we hardly wanted to discard entirely. But at the same time, a leaner, cleaner book is probably the way to go when you're writing in print for the Internet age. At a time when we have some writers wondering whether blogging is supplanting book readership--and indeed, when our book is already being criticized in blog comments by people who obviously haven't read it--you really want to have a text that folks can pleasantly read through, especially if you're writing nonfiction. I think the publishing industry gets this, and we are going to see lots of shorter books. So to us--and I think Orzel's review itself notices this--it was really important to have a tight main text that is a smooth, fun read. And then, for anyone wanting to go deeper, there's a wealth of additional information provided in back. Now, I grant that the "trailing phrase note" format may irk some readers, and I also concede that they aren't an ideal way of helping you find the elaboration that you want. But I also think superscripts would irk many other readers, and have their own drawbacks. The ideal thing, I suppose, would be if books were more like webpages, and each phrase that has a corresponding note would be hyperlinked to that note. Such a thing ought to be achievable on Kindle, you would think, though as I understand it, at least so far it is not integrated there--this reader, for one, wishes it had been. The idea of making books more like blogs strikes me as a bit ghastly, for some of the aforementioned reasons--but at least in this case it would probably be an improvement.
