Advancement in technology has positively impacted the development of e-library. These e-libraries boast books of all sorts.
So whatever book you desire, you can get it from an e-library. However, as a writer, citations are one of the elements to consider for every book you write. If you took ideas from other sources, which aren’t a new thing in writing anyway, you have to cite your sources.
Citations can be quite confusing. And if you don’t cite, but use other sources, then you plagiarized. Plagiarism is an offense that can have severe consequences for any writer’s career or wallet.
In this post, we shall be looking at how you can cite a kindle book in APA style. Keep reading for more crucial information.
Table of Contents
What Is Kindle?
Kindle is an e-book reader introduced by Amazon. It enables users to read e-books. Kindle can hold up to 1,400 e-books published by different authors. The Kindle e-reader is developed in a way that it works directly with the Amazon online store.
A user can buy an e-book on Amazon or subscribe to an electronic version of newspapers, magazines, blogs, and have them saved directly on Kindle. With the Kindle e-book reader, you do not need to bother about carrying out stacks of books, whether within a long or short distance. The Kindle e-book reader is not free; one would have to subscribe to its services for a certain fee.
Why Do I Need To Cite?
Citation is the escape route from plagiarism. After you have borrowed such a person’s intellectual property, you must give proper credence for the words and ideas you have borrowed.
This serves two primary purposes. Firstly, your work will receive credibility as its citation will reveal that you did not make up the facts. Secondly, citing your source helps you avoid plagiarism, damaging your image if it is discovered that you stole people’s ideas.
But then, how do you do that when you got the idea from a book that you read on an e-book reader, like Kindle. This can be trying and complicating. The challenge with this is that you do not know where to begin with citing the quotation you got from the book due to lack of page number, publisher, and some of these books without DOI (Digital Object Identifier). If you want to find more on how to cite a kindle book, you may want to continue reading.
Thankfully, the American Psychological Association has given a guide in their blog post on the citation of books from e-readers, like Kindle.
The citation of a quotation or book could be in-text or in the reference list. Making an in-text citation without the relevant details, like page number not being available, can be exhausting.
The good thing about the Kindle e-reader is that it has what is called ‘location numbers.’ With this, you can make accurate citations as these numbers are static. However, this is limited to Kindle Third generation product and as we advance.
E-book lovers who do not use the Kindle e-reader may find making citation difficult.
Whether the e-book has a page number or not may also depend on the book’s author, if he made the page number available.
Why The American Psychological Association Style Of Citation?
The American Psychological citation style provides a consistent presentation of sources relied upon in a research job.
The American Psychological Association holds that, initially, this citation style was created especially for use in social sciences, as a consistent way to track references in scholarly journal articles.
However, today, the American Psychological Association citation style is used across all courses in education. The rules guiding this style of citation is contained in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. This publication has undergone six updates, and the latest updated edition is the 7th, which was published in the year 2021.
Other forms of citation styles abound and include the following – the Chicago style, the Council of Science Editors (CSE) style, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) style, the American Chemical Society (ACS) style, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) style.
Citing A Kindle Book Without Page Number
Suppose there is no page number on the e-book you want to cite. The American Psychological Association provides that you add any of the following where appropriate in your citation.
- The number of the paragraph on the page where the quote is extracted. It could be the 3rd paragraph or the fifth, as the case may be. Or, where the paragraph number is lacking, you can count the sections from the top to the document’s bottom.
- An overarching heading and a paragraph number within that section or
- You can abbreviate the heading or write the header’s first few words in quotes, where the title is lengthy to cite in full.
The American Psychological Association gave an example below to demonstrate the points further above.
One of the author’s main points is that “people don’t rise from nothing” (Gladwell, 2008, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 5).
See Section 6.05 for more details on citing direct quotations of electronic sources without page numbers.
How To Cite A Quote In-Text
When you want to cite a quote from a Kindle book in text, all you need to do is to write the name of the author, the year that the book was published, the title of the Kindle book, the name of the Kindle device that you are using to read the book and give the DOI or URL of the book.
For instance:
Hemmingway, E. (2006). The Sun also arises [Kindle Paperwhite version]. Retrieved from amazon.com.
How To Cite A Chapter In A Kindle Book
There are instances where you may want to cite a chapter in a Kindle book. One person can author a book. In another case, many persons can write different chapters in a single book. In contrast, an independent person, the editor, can put them together.
What do you do then in the different circumstances above?
In the first instance, you may have to reference the whole book, using the example below.
Author, A.A. (Year). Title of work and chapter. [E-reader version]. Retrieved from https://xxxx or doi:xxxx.
In the second instance, you may have to provide a separate reference for each of the chapters you used. Below is the format that the citation may take.
Author, A.A. (Year). Title of chapter. In B.B. Editor (Ed.), the title of the book [E-reader version] (pp. xxx – xxx). Retrieved from https://xxxxx or doi:xxxx.
With this, you would have provided your reader with an adequate description of who wrote the whole book and the particular chapter in issue.
You may find that the e-book book lacks pagination. You can leave out that part in your citation.
Versions Of Kindle Book E-Reader
In its 6th edition, the American Psychological Association requires you to provide any information essential for the identification and retrieval of the title of the work you are referring to, i.e., the e-reader version. The version of the Kindle that you used to read the book you obtained the quote is critical. This explains why it is necessary to identify some standard versions of the Kindle e-reader.
They are the Kindle DX version, the Kindle Paperwhite version, the Kindle Oasis version, the Kindle Voyage version, the Kindle Touch version, the Kindle Cloud Reader version, the Kindle Android version, and the Kindle iOS version.
Using one of the above Kindle versions, let’s look at the example below.
Brian, T. (2017), Eat that Frog [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from amazon.com.
Citing A Kindle Book In The Reference List
Adding a reference list citation to your work provides adequate details as to the source of your information. This will help your readers trace easily and find your source and continue reading or researching the subject matter.
Where you need to make a citation in a reference list, you need the following details – the name of the author, the date, the title of the book (with the e-reader book type in the square bracket where it applies), and the DOI or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) where you downloaded the book. While editing, you can italicize the title of the text only.
This can be exemplified in this manner:
Author, A.A. (Year). Title of work. [E-reader version]. Retrieved from https://xxxx or doi:xxxx.
Conclusion
As obtained with hardcopy materials, quotations gotten from books published on Kindle should also be cited. And the American Psychological Association has provided a safe means of citing materials sourced from a Kindle e-book reader.
This is a massive relief for what may have been an issue for researchers who use an e-reader. If you are using a Kindle e-book reader and find a portion relevant to your research, you can conveniently cite it using the guides provided in this article. Hope that we have provided a useful guide on how to cite a kindle book in APA style with this article.
