Daniel Nehring’s blog post from the end of December, “And Then There Were No Books”, brings me news that…

“it seems that Argentina has banned, or almost banned, the import of foreign books” [and, in addition] “Amazon steadfastly refused to sell me certain electronic books due to my location in Argentina”.

Seems very curious. Stories in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere appear to confirm the bizarre news. You’d think they might have better things to ban. This is a nation that still has routine mass torture endemic in its institutions.

Daniel also writes that he worries about citing page numbers in ebooks, in a Kindle-tastic world of reflowable text. But many Kindle books now have “real” page numbers…

“[Amazon are] adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book’s print edition. We’ve already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, […] Page Numbers are only displayed when you press the Menu button.”

Even if your Kindle ereader book is obscure and doesn’t have “real” page numbers by default, simply go to Google Books and type a unique fragment of your quotation enclosed “in quote marks”. For most recent academic books you can now get a full-text image-preview of the relevant page, but even for older works Google Books should tell you the required page number and edition.