After much deliberation, I've decided to radically reformat the 'Gentle Introduction' book - including a full table of contents, specific references to current literature related to the subject of a particular chapter, and a full index index. Not a trivial amount of work, but it was time.
(Note: the new book will be presented in stages - stage 1 will be a complete reformatting - with updates - of Chapters 1 -> 14; stage 2 will be the addition of another 3 chapters - closed population estimates, robust design, and patch occupancy models).
In the process of doing this reformatting, I (*we*) need to make one big formatting decision: to number pages sequentially among consecutive chapters (e.g., chapter 1: pp. 1 -21, chapter 2: pp. 22-41, etc), or to number pages within each chapter (e.g., chapter 1: pp. 1-21, chapter 2: pp. 1-19, etc). Most of you will recognize that the book currently follows the second paradigm.
In some ways, the *traditional* numbering convention (sequential among chapters) is easier to maintain at my end, and makes the resulting index easier to read, and maintain. If we go with 'within chapter' numbering, the index might look something like:
history, encounter
1-21, 2-12, 2-14, 3-18
referrring to chapter 1 - p. 21, chapter 2 - p. 12, and chapter 3 - p. 18, respectively. While you can get used to this, its a bit confusing a first, and is a bit tricky to maintain at my end.
So, why not simply use the consecutive numbering by chapters approach? Well - one big reason - if I *tweak* any one chapter in any way that changes its length, then the pagination of ALL following chapters will need to be changed also. For example, suppose chapter 5 goes from pp. 88-97. If I make a change such that the pagination for chapter 5 goes from pp. 88-100, then all succeeding chapters (6, 7...14) will need to be incremented by 3. Meaning, to having correctly sequenced (numbered) chapters, you'd need to not only download the new chapter 5, but also all succeeding chapters as well.
Alternatively, I could simply forgo making individual chapters available, and simply provide only the entire book as a fully indexed PDF. This makes keeping track of updates easier, but means you download the entire book (bigger PDF file) every time I tweak something.
So, if you have a suggestion, or a preference, please let me know. Don't post replies here - simply send me an email directly (you know where to find me...).
