> How does the user know whether the footnote is a citation or is explanatory? Used to be that was one of the distinctions between footnotes and end notes. Thi

> How does the user know whether the footnote is a citation or is explanatory? Used to be that was one of the distinctions between footnotes and end notes. This is an affordance where that lost distinction in ebooks is most felt, I think. An equally old practice, however, is to use different marks for footnotes versus end notes, and that's something I've felt could be readopted in a digital context. In particular the asterisk, dagger, double dagger, very rare triple dagger symbology was used for foot notes only (as there are only a few such symbols, versus numerals, and they can't be "document global"). In a medium with hyperlinks, symbol uniqueness is less of a problem so asterisks for all footnotes and numbers for end notes is possible. Similarly, we aren't as limited typographically with what metal we have available in ebooks, we could enlist a much wider variety of symbols (emoji notes, perhaps?), or even pair symbols and numbers. Perhaps the biggest thing holding us back right now is that publishers want to use the same design tools for both print and ebook (for good reason), but ideas like increasing symbol variety or pairing symbols and numbers are both reasonable options to make it to print as well if they need to be kept close in similarity for ease of production.