I can see both (or all three) ways. I do prefer quotes, but that’s probably more habit than anything. My thinking is also in line with you, Josh, that it’s the OUTLET that matters, not the dead tree. So The New York Times is never in italics, because it’s an organization/business, not a single product. In an age of media convergence, it’s important to treat all outlets the same, so The New York Times gets neither italics nor quotes, just like NPR and Fox News don’t.

But more on topic, I suspect a lot of the italics vs quotes debate comes down to academic vs journalistic background, or more precisely for what industry/outlet you work. As you rightly note, style guides conflict with each other on this (and many) issues. Therefore, those who work primarily with one style will be more apt to argue its rules, while people in the opposite camp will argue their point. If there’s one thing multiple style standards do well, it’s muddy debates and confuse people. Fun!

Italics for book titles, quotes for titles. “Digital” and “e” are (or will be soon) is meaningless labels.

Italics for book titles, quotes for titles. “Digital” and “e” are (or will be soon) is meaningless labels.

Italics for book titles, quotes for titles. “Digital” and “e” are (or will be soon) is meaningless labels.

I think what some folks might be missing is that I’m very much aware of the division between treatment of book titles and article/short story titles. My question is how we should treat things that fall in between. If something is an article in one context, but is published as an ebook, does it lose its articleness and gain bookness, just because the exact same content has shifted platforms?

In other words, if I read Sebastian Rotella’s piece on my iPad’s web browser it’s an “article,” but if I read the exact same article in my iPad’s Kindle app, it’s a book?

I think what some folks might be missing is that I’m very much aware of the division between treatment of book titles and article/short story titles. My question is how we should treat things that fall in between. If something is an article in one context, but is published as an ebook, does it lose its articleness and gain bookness, just because the exact same content has shifted platforms?

In other words, if I read Sebastian Rotella’s piece on my iPad’s web browser it’s an “article,” but if I read the exact same article in my iPad’s Kindle app, it’s a book?

This might be silly, but maybe we should go with underlining titles?

These already designate links and proper titles that should be italicized, is it going that much further to indicate articles but that aren’t properly books, that are available on eReaders?

the choice is in creative in `write ´
pero estoy de acuerdo en las falllas que se cometen en la internet y es un “error a futuro” para el que plactica ” las bellas letras”

Despite what academics have been immersed in, italics are a style designation—an artistic choice…not an indicator of a certain type of reference.

A type designer might decide to not even create an italic weight for his or her font (the popular Lucida Grande is one example.) In the separation between content and style, you don’t really know what font your content is being displayed in.

Therefore, as editorial people, your job is to tag the title correctly—with em tags, perhaps, or with a microformat or class that indicates “book title”—and let the designers determine if the book title will be visually distinguished with color, weight, obliqueness, quotes, or not at all. In some environments (RSS, mobile) it might look one way. On the vast screen that is a modern desktop browser, maybe some other way.

I say base it on the the article’s relationship to the publisher. If the publisher is a book publisher, it takes italics. If it came from ProPublica, the New York Times or any other publication that deals with publishing articles (or, like the Times, is a publication that already takes italics), use quotes. And that’s regardless of what device you read it on personally. The key distinction is the publisher, the owner.

Album is to Song as Magazine is to Article, even if the article is sold by itself. An EP still gets italics, even if it is just a few songs long.

Can we not distinguish between an article and a book on an ebook reader? Ebook is something of a misleading title if the designation of ebook is given to publications which are clearly not books as we usually understand them.

Books are rarely shorter than 100 pages. Articles rarely above 10. Given our likely continued ability to distinguish between books and magazine articles within the ebook format, can we not continue to use italics for book-like documents and quotes for article-like documents?

I guess the discussion I’m trying to spark is getting at what determines what is “book-like” and what is “article-like.” :)

Things that are considered books:
- children’s books with maybe 50 words over 20 pages
- poetry chapbooks with maybe 50 pages

Things that are considered articles:
- that 24,000-word Scientology article in The New Yorker
- John Hersey’s Hiroshima when it’s in The New Yorker in 1946 (but *not* when it’s it was published as a book soon thereafter)

In all those cases, which was what was made evident by packaging. The articles were packaged as part of a whole, and you were actually buying the whole, not the part. The books were sold as separate items. There’s also the difference in the physical packaging — we know what a book looks like, in other words.

But those packaging distinctions disappear on a digital device. I can buy Sebastian Rotella’s piece for my Kindle the same way I can buy a Tolstoy novel. There’s no difference in packaging or appearance once its on my device. I might notice that War and Peace is a lot longer than the Rotella piece, but then again, there have been many, many thousands of books published that are shorter than 12,000 or 24,000 words.

Basically, I’m just raising the point that (a) these distinctions get a lot blurrier when they lose their analogs in the traditional world, and (b) it’s worth thinking about *why* we make those visual distinctions anyway. Why do we want the titles of an article and a book to look differently on the page? Presumably because that difference includes some form of information for the reader. Well, how is that information changing?

I am, as Josh noted in the post, an italics apologist…so take anything I say on this with a grain of salt. (Or, I guess, a a grain of salt.) But to try to apply some logic to what is ultimately a shamelessly baseless bias on my part, here’s why I think italics should apply to books even of the e-variety:

Italics, as Josh said, come down to the idea of wholeness, of completeness, of thing-in-itself-ness. But they come down to something else, too, I think: They’re reflective of a kind of hierarchy of value that we, as a culture, assign to our literary products. Books, as a form of literary expression, generally rank above magazine articles — and so, in writing, get the honor of italics. Same deal for albums vs. singles. And films vs. TV shows.

Those rankings are, of course, hugely arbitrary — “Mad Men” is better, under almost any measure, than Tron: Legacy, just as pretty much any New Yorker article, in terms of Overall Cultural Worth, will trump pretty much any bodice-rippy romance novel. It doesn’t matter. The point is the consensual value we place on the unit of expression itself; books and films are superlative, as forms; italics are a tacit recognition of that fact.

And ebooks, under that measure, are no different from, you know, -books. Normatively, and regardless of their packaging, they are the same form. But that means, I think, that they deserve the same visual signifiers we confer on their pulp-and-ink counterparts. The props of the tag.

Of course, as Josh also noted above, I think these considerations are largely transitional problems — in the sense that they’re questions for a flat-text world. As hypertext becomes increasingly common, the visual cues we’ve created to signify the form of a work — which is to say, the cultural status of the form of a work — will likely be subsumed by the insta-context of a link. Meantime, though: Italics! All the way.

But Megan, why would you argue for supporting a system that, as you said, is arbitrary and wrong? If we have a system that puts Mad Men below a self-help paperback, we should, as good cultural revolutionaries, be trying to tear that system down, not trying to squeeze our favorite little bundle of content into the good graces of slanty text!

In all seriousness, the great accomplishment of the Internet is social leveling. The reader can now become the writer, the NYT and some guy’s blog are equally linkable, the Amazon reviewer can have as much cultural/sales impact as the book critic, etc. And part of that is also a flattening of medium — everything appears in the same browser window or on the same device.

And I think that’s a good thing! While I think it’s in theory a good thing for ebooks that they might get the same italicized social capital as a print book, it’s an even *better* thing to push along the great flattening, so that we can evaluate content on its merits and not on its physical or digital format.

I think we need to use more different punctuation marks online so I suggest ebooks ne enclosed in ¥ yen signs to show solidarity with the poor Japanese. ¥For Whom the Bell Tolls¥ has a nice ring.

I vote for quotation marks for all uses because they stick with the text. Italics are lost if a passage is cut and pasted in email, texted, or otherwise processed through another platform.

I think that as the way we consume books (digitally) evolves, our definition of what is a book will have to evolve as well. If I write a 100 pages and Amazon or BN allows me to publish it as a digital book – then it’s a book.

Therefore I think it should be italicized just like any other 800 paged book. Let’s not change the writing style rules – let’s instead be a little more flexible about how we define a book.

The information provided by quotes or italics generally (in a print world) relates to the medium something was produced for, such as an article in a magazine or a blog vs. a whole book. This might help you find this piece of information if you wanted to cite it and/or read it.

I suppose if ebook readers do not make a distinction between books and articles when searching for, say, War and Peace, you might get Tolstoy’s book and a bunch of articles also titled War and Peace (reviews, unrelated things, etc.). If I later wanted to refer to War and Peace the article, might I have to say just that: War and Peace, the article?

I’m sort of jumbling up my response to this issue, but hopefully it ends up making some kind of sense. Keeping the distinction between articles and books intact is more difficult if someone (hopefully not named Tolstoy) decides to write a 30,000-word thingemabob called War and Peace and put it on an ereader. What is it then? In non-print form, there isn’t a real difference between extra-long magazine articles and extra-short books.

I don’t have a definite answer as to whether I would prefer italics or quotes. But I suspect language will begin to lean toward a uniform method of treating wholes and parts, standalones vs. parts of a collection, because that’s the simplest method of doing things and simple (I’m not saying simple=negative) usually wins out.

As the director of Dan Poynter’s Global eBook Awards (http://awardsforebooks.com), I can only say that we’re looking at this as well. We agree with you that in dealing with the issue of ‘ebook’ versus ‘e-book’ (with caps or without and where when it is) and have come down on the same side of the argument as you that it is ‘ebook.’ (We figured out that the dash goes away when the novelty wears off.) We hope you’ll agree on eBook when part of a proper capitalized phrase, headline or title. As far as quotes or italics go, my first inclination is to say that if you can italicize then please do. And if it’s an anthology of poetry, then the poem titles outside the anthology get quotes as well as the chapters but the book gets italics. Quotes go around quotations or a part of the whole. Italics are for titles where they CAN be used; obviously, I can’t use bold format for the word CAN for emphasis and I can’t type italics in this comment area so I would use quotation marks for book titles right here.

I came from it from the idea of citing it in a paper or, better yet, how I would tell someone about it in a conversation. I wouldn’t, say, “Oh, you should read this article that I purchased from Kindle.” I would say “You should read this article from ProPublica.” The idea is: how would a normal person try to go back and find this article? Would they have an easier time thinking of a magazine and the subject of an article (regardless if it’s available as a Kindle single), or would have to somehow remember the exact title of an article and look in *every* article published in an ebook format? (Yes, I know there are categories.) I’d argue the former.

The publication is, at this moment, a better signifier of where to find something than that of a byline. Now that journalists are building their own brands and becoming columnists and name-recognized pundits and having their work aggregated everywhere and getting to be authors in their own right, that may change. But for now? Use the “part of a larger whole” even it were sold separately. Just because you clip out an article from a magazine and sell it to someone at the bingo table, it doesn’t mean it didn’t come from a magazine and it certainly doesn’t make it a pamphlet. :)

Re: NYT publishing books, sure. But people don’t think of the Times as a book publisher, just as they don’t think of ProPublica as a clearing house for articles sold on Kindle. They’re both publications of a sort. Just as they don’t think of Random House as an ebook publisher. They print books.) My general rule of thumb would be how “typical” people know a company or publication.

Most of us won’t have time to evaluate each link on it’s merit. We should be cued without searching whether something has the authoritative weight of an article or a book. I was tempted to say that the publisher’s designation of a work as a book should hold sway, but in te approaching age of self-publishing that argument loses value.

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