The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

Editorial Comments for v7a.5

Page Numbers

Up to APF v7a.0, each annotation was identified (apart from the relevant quote) by two page numbers: one for the Gollancz hardcover, one for the Corgi paperback. Unfortunately, this system has a number of drawbacks.

One minor problem is that I have never liked the look of those double page numbers. The “247/391” strings look ugly, bloat the text, and make the annotations just that tiny bit harder to read.

A more serious problem is that having two page numbers is a maintenance headache. Double the numbers means double the chance of mistakes. And since I don’t own Terry’s books in both hardcover and paperback editions myself, I have to rely on volunteers to supply fully half of the data I need: all the page numbers for the editions of the books I don’t have.

Thankfully, so far I have had the help of volunteers who do a stellar job on this, but it does still mean that I can never just add an annotation without having to go bother someone else for the second page number. This makes annotating a two-step process, which is especially tiresome now that APF updates happen incrementally and in a more on-the-fly kind of fashion.

The most serious drawback, however, and the one that has made me reconsider the whole setup, is fairly recent, and caused by the fact that there are now so many different editions of Terry’s books available that the percentage of readers to whom either of the page numbers I supply means anything useful, is shrinking, and will only get smaller over time. Not only do we now have American editions in widespread use, but we also have reissues of the older Corgi paperbacks and Gollancz hardcovers, both with page counts that are different from the previous editions.

Finally, I think the most useful aspects of the page numbers is that they provide a ordering of the list of annotations for a given book. I strongly suspect that the actual numbers are used more often by me as editor than by the vast majority of APF readers. Had Terry written in chapters, I probably would never have used page numbers at all, but merely listed the annotations on a per-chapter basis. I don’t think that there are that many readers of the APF who habitually use the page numbers as a link back from individual annotations to the source text. Rather, it will be the other way around, and on a much more global level: “I have just read Pyramids, now I’ll go browse through the annotations for that book and see what I’ve missed”.

With all that in mind I have decided that as of v7a.5.4 of the APF I will be returning to uni-numbered annotations, based on the editions of the books I happen to have in my possession.