The Chronicle just published an article by Tushar Rae about how E-Books’ Varied Formats Make Citations a Mess for Scholars. I think this was prompted by the Association of Internet Researchers thread “Citing from a Kindle”, which touched on a number of interesting (and annoying) issues of how to best cite digital sources. In Good Faith Collaboration (GFC) my approach was to make use of the accessibility of the Web and, also, hope for the best:

However, I recommend consulting the online bibliography where I include hypertextual references whenever possible, including for printed sources now online. This is common for recent works, sometimes as preprints or author’s copies, and for older works in the public domain; I use the publication date of the version I used. For older works, if necessary, I often mention the original publication date. Page numbers might refer to the original pagination or to an online printout; I hope it will be clear to the reader which is the case. [References]

However, for those who might like to cite GFC once the complete Web edition comes out (at the end of this year) one will be able to link (via URIs with fragment identifiers) to every chapter, section, and paragraph. For example, here’s a link to the 15th paragraph of chapter one: https://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/chapter-1#p15