Footnotes, endnotes and the reader's patience
A note is an interruption. The reader is inside a sentence, a small number appears, and you have asked them to stop, look somewhere else, and find their way back.
So the question is not which style is correct. It is how much interruption the material is worth, and there are three answers, not two: the foot of the page, the back of the book, or the text itself.
Footnotes are immediate, and they cost you layout
A footnote is read. The eye drops an inch, takes the note, and comes back, and most readers do it without resentment. That makes the foot of the page the right home for two kinds of material: the note the sentence does not work without — a translation, a unit, the one fact that makes the line make sense — and the note that is genuinely entertaining and pays the reader back for the trip.
The cost is in the page. The composed page must reserve room for its notes, so the text block gets shorter wherever a note lands, and a page carrying four notes holds noticeably less text than the page before it. A note longer than the space left breaks across pages, so the reader meets its tail under text that moved on two minutes ago.
They add pages, too, and pages set the spine. A note-heavy book runs meaningfully longer than the same manuscript with its notes at the back.
Endnotes give you clean pages, and most readers will not turn
Endnotes are the standard for academic work and for most serious nonfiction, and the reason is the page: the text runs uninterrupted, the measure is even, and a note can be four hundred words without costing the design anything.
The price is simple, and you should plan around it. The great majority of readers will never turn to them. So nothing a reader needs in order to understand a sentence can live back there.
End of chapter or end of book is a real choice. Chapter-end notes are easier to reach and keep each chapter self-contained. Book-end notes are the scholarly default and keep the whole body clean — but they work only if the notes section is grouped under chapter headings, with a running head naming the chapter, so finding note 14 of chapter 6 is not a search.
The third option is usually the right one
Most notes in a first draft are one of two things: material that belongs in the sentence, or material that belongs nowhere.
If the note explains something the reader needs, it is nearly always one clause in the main text, and the book is better for having it there. If it exists to show your work, ask whether a reader would thank you for the trip. Cutting is free, it costs no pages, and nobody has ever complained about a note they did not see.
In the Interior Formatter. Notes are pages like any other, so the composed page count — the one that decides your spine width — settles only once they are placed, and that final count flows straight to the Cover Maker. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
A note and a citation are different jobs
A note adds something: a comment, an aside, a qualification. A citation points at a source. Books that treat them as one thing end up with an apparatus nobody enjoys, because the reader who wants your aside wades through page ranges and the reader checking a source keeps hitting jokes.
Separate them. Sources go in one system — numbered endnotes, author and date in parentheses against a works-cited list, or the trade-nonfiction arrangement where the notes section is keyed by page number and a quoted phrase, with no marker in the text at all. Comments go in another, and there should be far fewer of them than you think.
Numbering, and the markers themselves
Restart the numbers in every chapter. Numbers stay small, a note added to chapter 2 does not renumber the other four hundred, and the reader looks up note 9 of chapter 11 rather than note 287. Running straight through only suits a short book with no chapter divisions.
Symbols work when notes are rare. An asterisk, then a dagger, then a double dagger, reset on each page, suit a memoir or a novel with a handful of asides. They stop working the moment a page needs four.
Markers go after the punctuation, set as superscript, and at the end of a sentence wherever you can put them there. A marker mid-clause makes the reader choose between leaving now and finishing the thought.
Keep markers out of headings. Never hang a note off a chapter title, a part title or a subhead. That heading is reused in the table of contents, in running heads and in the ebook's navigation, where a stray superscript digit is meaningless and a screen reader may read the number aloud. If a whole chapter needs a source note, use an unnumbered note at the foot of its first page.
In an ebook there is no foot of the page
This is the part that catches note-heavy books, and it is not a formatting detail. A reflowable file has no fixed pages — the page is whatever the device makes of the text at the size the reader chose — so there is no foot for a footnote to sit at.
The marker becomes a link instead. The reader taps it, the file jumps to the note somewhere else entirely, and then they have to navigate back. Some reading systems show the note in a small pop-up without moving the reader, but only when the file marks its notes with the right EPUB 3 semantics, and you cannot rely on any given device doing it.
So a book whose argument or humor lives in its footnotes needs a decision about the ebook rather than a conversion. Decide which notes survive, work the essential ones into the text, and accept that the reading experience differs. Scholarly books travel best, because their endnotes were already at the back and the print reader had to turn as well.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Does your nonfiction book need an index? · Also in this guide: Does your book need a table of contents? · The back of the book is where your next sale is · EPUB and print PDF are two different books