Not really, but it is at least the QWERTY of science.^{[This post is a bit more emotional.]} I really hate them.^{[It’s very emotional.]} Here is why.

Required background: None.

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If you are not a scientist, you might think that everything in science is reasonable, efficient, objective, meaningful, etc. But it is not always like this, and the abundance of endnotes in many books (mostly in philosophy, social sciences, popular science, etc.) is proof enough that science is in real danger.

Footnotes, Appendices, References

OK, to confess: writing a book is challenging! In particular, and in contrast to most research papers published in academic journals, you like to target an audience as large as possible—from the closest peers in your field of research to neighboring fields to neighboring disciplines to perhaps (if you write a popular science book) layman. So, you like to make it precise, detailed, broad and pedagogical at the same time. Puuuh…

Luckily, there are some helpful tools you can use in a book. Those are:

• Footnotes bring up a point that is interesting to note within a given context but doesn’t serve the main narrative. Personally, I like footnotes if they are used only occasionally (and you should never refer back to a footnote in the main text). Since they are visually separated from the main text, they allow the brain to adapt to the extra content (“aha, something interesting but not necessary…”).
• An appendix is in some sense a very long footnote that gets shifted to the end of the book for space reasons, although appendices often serve a different purpose. For instance, since not every reader has the same background, many appendices are included for pedagogical reasons to make a book as self-contained as possible. But after all, it is still some content that doesn’t fit the main narrative and therefore gets “outsourced”.
• References do not contain any content at all, but they provide a further reading list and are included to pay due credit to those who originally came up with some idea, method, study, etc… Or something like that. How to cite well is a whole different story and should not bother us now.

Endnotes

Endnotes simply combine all three aspects above into one place, and in some books they take up 20-30% of the pages. Look at the examples below (I won’t tell you the title of the books as that’s not important).

This produces a bunch of disadvantages. The worst thing is that the reader is basically forced to read a book on two pages at once. Because you never know whether the endnote refers to something important (which could also be the case if you abuse footnotes), whether it helps you to understand some difficult passage in the text (as you would hope from an appendix), or whether it merely contains some reference (which is not at all essential to follow a text).

Moreover, one often enough gets the feeling that authors use endnotes to tell the reader what the heck they all know beyond what is actually essential (“hey reader, by the way, did you know that… even though it doesn’t matter, but let me tell you that… capiche?”). They are basically used as the garbage can of the book—but woe betide you miss the essential endnote without which you only understand half of the book…

And some authors even shamelessly combine footnotes, appendices, references and endnotes in one book…

Now, here is the list of advantages of endnotes:

OK, if you know only one advantage of endnotes (that is not captured by a footnote, appendix or reference), please let me know. If not, dear editors at all publishing houses, ban endnotes now!!!