Red Rock Eater Digest - Part IV. Bad Design

(24) Bad Information Design in Scholarly Books

I often read scholarly books, that being part of my job. And
most scholarly books come with endnotes. This "scholarly apparatus"
is indispensible if you are trying to map a new field, and so I spend
much time referring back and forth between the text and endnotes.
(I don't care about the choice between footnotes and endnotes, and
I understand the publishers' concern that footnotes depress sales.)

Now, properly designed books make this flipping-back-and-forth easy
by printing things like "Endnotes for pages 137-144" at the top of
each endnote page. What pisses me off is the majority of publishers
that don't do this. In fact it's doubly annoying: they make you
flip around to remember what number chapter you're reading, which
makes you feel stupid because you can't remember the number from
one minute to the next, or else you have to exercise great cognitive
effort in order to keep the number in mind when you'd rather be trying
to understand what's in the book, and then they make you flip around
in the endnotes to find the endnotes for that chapter number. Ack!

There are plenty of other ways to present scholarly notes, as
designers of more arts-oriented scholarly books have shown for years.
But publishers, well, publishers have their habits.