“This is the English translation [177] of some German text.”

…indicates that in the German, page 177 begins with the German for “of some German text.”

That’s pretty elegant. It’s partly cool because it moves backwards — rather than require a new markup for books, it only places that onus on new material. That smells “right” to me.

And it was devised by academics (and eventually commercial interests) too, for exactly these kinds of problems. How do you point out a “page” when all the content is in one stream? Hyperlinks. How do you enforce layout, font, color, and style when the user can manipulate the raw text all they want? You use CSS to implement a default style.

Admittedly it has limits and is not perfect, but its a solid model to move from. You seem to touch on this a bit in the comments. Another interesting element of HTML is the ability to hide data and manipulate it. Notes needn’t be at the bottom, side, or appendix. They can exist “behind” their marker in the text, only to appear when the user focuses on them. Page numbers, line numbers, even word numbers can all exist as hidden information; a rich backdrop of meta-content to be explored as needed by the users (by users I mean content providers and consumers).

But I think, in a lot of ways, Google was right: its all about search. I feel like “Check page 123″ or “Go to section 3:14″ are both archaic and artificial to how we naturally approach text. Closer is “it’s in the Ship section, near the part about lasers.” Search technology turns that phrasing into a position in the text through something like “Ship : Lasers : Cool Thing”. It’s not referential referencing, but contextual referencing.

The example I have foremost in mind is large sections of dialogue, where the paragraph markers would become line markers and so become fairly intrusive to the text. I imagine there are other situations where the resolution of the paragraph is inconvenient as a reference (such as anything written by John Locke). Formatting issues could alleviate the noise (consider the contemporary example set by ruby characters).

That said, it’s a small niggle of an insightful look at ways to break ebooks out of their book heritage. I keep getting excited at the thought of putting a PDF on my iPod Touch for easy reference on the go, but the reality is that it’s a royal pain to actually reference them in that format.

Lanfranc, my issue with a facsimile is that it fails to take advantage of the possibilities inherent in unpaginated text. Paginated text is, logically, a subset of paginated text and therefore less powerful intrinsically. Adobe itself chose to develop “reflowable” formats (ePub) rather than retrofit PDF precisely because (I think) a correctly retooled PDF would in fact be a reflowable format, and patching an already aging construct was probably less viable for them than building from the foundation of an intrinsically more powerful idea.

I understand that you don’t want simply a digital facsimile, but it does seem that this is the best way to get a correlation, especially since it can be done improving the already available technology, rather than (re-)inventing entirely new ways of doing essentially the same thing.

Commercial interest — a potential prime driver of technology in this case, at least as far as adoption goes — is going to demand some preservation of presentation control, because presentation control allows the commercial entities to enforce brand awareness and to control how the commercial value of the content is delivered to the end consumer.

TiVo crushed the rest of the DVR market early on because they deliberately worked on strategies to play well with the commercial interests of advertisers (which is why a 30-second skip option on TiVos is a deeply buried feature and not enabled by default, among other things). So ceding some amount of presentation control to commercial interests is going to better enable the rest of the ideal implementation of our hypothetical badass e-reader of tomorrow.