Oxford publications started up a sort of revolution on how printed books are accessed online.
Most other publishers put the exact same book, in a single PDF or Epub format, online for sale. Oxford makes an important change that seems to start a revolution on how we consume books online. In Oxford’s system, each of the chapters of the books stand by themselves as published articles. Each of the chapters of the collection gets their own DOI that they can be read, downloaded or referred independently of the main book.
Look at this video how it works.
Now, we are in a position to have the cake and eat it at the same time. The old conflicts on whether to keep books broke into their chapters and sections (as such a system facilitates searching and discovery on each of the chapters), or, keep it together to be able to see the work as a whole immediately disappears. We have both the whole and the individuals at the same time.
So, I have been wondering on how to mirror that system in Bookends. I experimented on how each of these independent chapters could be managed. Bookends has a mechanism to manage Chapters separately; while still linked to the main book. Bookends is such a well-thought application: each of the chapters are able to live by themselves just exactly like they are presented in Oxford Scholarship Online. I am so impressed. I haven’t seen any other offline reference manager that is able to manage chapters like Bookends (Oxford).
The more I use each of the features, the more appreciate how well-designed Bookends is.
For me, I used to split PDF books into specific page ranges (page 1-50; 51-100 etc) just to keep the large pdf books easier for my searching tools like Foxtrot. I have already explained the system before.
Now, with Oxford Scholarship online and Bookends, I don’t need to split. I simply download each of the chapters and attach them as chapters into a single reference entry in Bookends. The pdf files of each of the chapters are attached to their corresponding entries. It is much better system because I won’t have duplication of information. I only hope that all other publishers offer books in the same way to the Oxford Scholarship online.
Dellu 