Books would be more conversational, and thus 'contribute' more, if certain reader-friendly conventions, listed below, were adopted.
- End the maddening practice of including only the chapter title (if even that is provided) in page headings, and only the chapter number in end-notes' divisional headings. (Providing page-ranges too would further improve the usefulness of the divisional headings.) Instead, include both pieces of information in both places.
- Include the chapter number (and also any sub-chapter number) in citations, as well as the page number.
- The year of publication should be on the title page and all useful bibliographic data (such as cataloguing information) should be on a single page, or at least a pair of facing pages.
- Bibliographies should include ISBN numbers, which can be useful when obtaining out-of-print books.
- Bibliographies would be more helpful to researchers if they included books' 'call numbers' (Lib. of Cong. #, or Dewey Decimal #, or ...); and also - for an obscure book - the name of a library that holds it.
- In bibliographies, when publication dates are given, the date of first publication, if different from that of the edition one is citing, should be included as well (either before a slash or in parentheses).
- Tear-off reader-response forms should be provided in books that cry out for a follow-up book (or article) whose material only readers can provide.
- A less aggressive convention that would implicitly encourage such comments would be for publishers to print their full address on the title or copyright page of those books whose author would like to receive material from readers.
- A notice should inform interested readers if (and how) they can buy supplementary material, such as appendixes, annotated bibliographies, prologues, digressive chapters, background remarks, footnotes, illustrations, and even follow-up articles by the author (or others).
- An especially useful supplement would be an up-to-date bibliography of a book's reviews - especially reviews of serious non-fiction. Eventually, an online databank (on the Internet?) should be established to which publishers would periodically contribute their latest book-review data. In addition, perhaps the government should encourage periodicals to form a consortium to deposit their full-text book reviews into a unified online databank.
Roger Knights, 5446 45th Avenue SW, Seattle, WA 98136-1108, USA (tel 206 932 5446; fax 206 932 9324).
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