HarperCollins made a tiny tweak to its book design—and has saved thousands of trees as a result

When I first read about this I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I have not noticed anything different in books I've read since.

What will be interesting is if HarperCollins extend this into page sensitive books, such as The Lord of the Rings where pagination has been an important factor over the years. If the new deluxe uses this method, it will render it less useful to use during research so it is a factor that has to be considered with certain books.

But that said, anything that saves trees is a plus in my eyes. Next task is to convince all publishers to drop blank pages.

Something that I think may happen at some point is that physical page numbers are dropped in books and an alternative is used instead, such as paragraph numbers, which could be shown instead of page numbers, this means that the locations are the same even if the font is different. It would also work for eBooks.

Trotter wrote:

Something that I think may happen at some point is that physical page numbers are dropped in books and an alternative is used instead, such as paragraph numbers, which could be shown instead of page numbers, this means that the locations are the same even if the font is different. It would also work for eBooks.

Digital Tolkien Project enters the chat!

This is I think probably a wise move in future and a great way to solve the problem of editions, be they physical or digital.

For classic works that have been in print for a few decades and have numerous editions, I think the best reference would be chapter name/number, and the first sentence of the new paragraph that contains the reference.

It’s all well and good that the new HoM-e boxes have appropriate page numbers - but what about the *other* books Christopher references by page number only?

Page numbering for a book that has been reformatted and reprinted (eg Hobbit or Lord of the Rings) is mostly useless as a solid reference, which is why other systems are already in use.

As an example, the Mythore submission guidelines:

The 50th Anniversary one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings (2004 and later printings) is our preferred edition. Cite your quotations including the book and chapter number so we can easily change them to this edition if you use a different one. For example, LotR VI.5.937 refers to Book 6, Chapter 5 “The Steward and The King,” page 937 in the edition cited.

Tolkien’s Letters: Because the print and electronic editions have different methods for indicating what letter is being cited, our preference for in-text citations is: Cite by page AND letter number (i.e., Letters 51, #43).

For important standard fantasy texts like the Narnia books, The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, the Harry Potter books, Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and so on that are available in multiple editions with different pagination, please include the chapter number for the page you cite. It is especially crucial to do this if you are citing from a Kindle or other electronic edition. For example, Hobbit XIII.150, Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" 5.55.

EMH's Lord of the Rings reference system, and all of the hard work being done over at digitaltolkien.com are very important for being able to understand print references in editions you don't have.

I do disagree that publishers will ever stop putting page numbers in their books, though. 😉 Their target audience is readers, not scholars.

I'm not against this, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the environment and everything to do with cutting costs. PR departments can and will spin anything.

Poems would get some benefits from dropping page numbers. It can be difficult to tell whether a page break starts a new stanza too. There are dozens of such mistakes in the kindle edition of Collected Poems. The same mistake creeps into many reprints of LR, Adventure, and many other books containing stanzaed poems.