Publisher's home office in citations now irrelevant?

[Richard Wiggins]

I am working on a book ("A Guide to the Literature of the Internet") which
is mostly a sort of metabook -- a catalog of the most useful/important
Internet titles (also includes non-book resources).

While trying to look up the official address of Microsoft Press (is it
Redmond or elsewhere?) it finally hit me that the long-standing practice of
including the publisher's city in a bibliographic citation is increasingly
outdated if not nearly useless.

Presumably this practice arose as an access point for finding a book if the
local bookstore didn't carry it.  So "New York: John Wiley and Sons" might
be a useful handle to grab. Presumably you found out Wiley's address, wrote
them by US Mail, and they told you by return mail how to order the book from
them or some other source.

But in the world of the Web and Amazon, not to mention union catalogs and
regional interlibrary loan, it seems to me that the number of people who
look up a publisher and correspond with them via snail mail to locate a book
must be vanishingly small.

Moreover, many publishers have imprints whose offices are spread across
various cities.  That locale information also seems useless to most folks
(except maybe potential authors).

At least for industrialized countries, it seems a URL (or even a phone
number or even their ISBN prefix) would be useful, and a city name for the
home office is now superflous. Are we ready for:

Rosenfeld, Louis, and Peter Morville. Information Architecture for the World
Wide Web. www.ora.com: O'Reilly, 1998. 202p. $24.95. ISBN 1565922824.

... instead of...

Rosenfeld, Louis, and Peter Morville. Information Architecture for the World
Wide Web. Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly, 1998. 202p. $24.95. ISBN 1565922824.

???

/rich

PS -- please send me a private note if you have favorite highly-useful
Internet books -- ones you feel taught you a lot or that you refer to
frequently (beyond the known biggies of course).

Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
www.netfact.com/rww         wiggins at mail.com
517-349-6919 (home office)  517-353-4955 (work)  
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