back
21 comments
It appears there is no legal e-book or offline digital version of recent editions of the manual, at any price, with or without DRM. There is only the printed, hardcover edition, and a subscription-only, online-only website with the contents of the 17th and 18th editions, presented as a single paragraph per page, and poorly typeset, particularly for symbols. There's no legal way to obtain a long-term digital copy of a particular edition; it's not clear if the publishers intend to keep editions back to the 17th available online for the subscription, or only the two most recent editions: this is of relevance to me because I found the mathematics chapter particularly useful and unusual for style guides, and the authors decided to remove the entire chapter in the 18th edition.

Even if calculated as the cost of having access to an edition for the approximately seven years it remains the most recent, assuming the pricing doesn't increase, and using multi-year payments, the legal online-only access involves a subscription that would cost close to four times the list price of the hardcover book, something that you would own in perpetuity. It doesn't appear that the online subscription's content is continually updated, or that it offers any advantage over the book beyond being electronic, and having its page views used to motivate decisions like removing the mathematics chapter. It is a subscription, and online-only, merely by virtue of being a digital version of a printed book.

Meanwhile, readers who aren't concerned about using a pirated copy can easily obtain a clean, searchable, PDF from page images and OCR, with the book's typesetting, and more than one paragraph visible at once. This is, of course, usable offline.

The discrepancy between what is available to readers who want a legal digital copy, at any price, and readers who don't care, is quite disappointing.

Chicago is my style guide of choice, although I have an older edition. The only real alternative is the AP style guide, which I don’t favor because I’m not a journalist.

There’s a lot of focus on citations in this review, but citations are only a small part of the guide. I’m usually looking up things like capitalization, punctuation, or quotation rules that I half-remember.

AP and Chicago are mostly quite similar although AP differs in a few specific things, e.g. no Oxford comma. Where I used to work, we generally used Chicago, Merriam-Webster, and IBM but we would go with AP for things like press releases because journalists generally use AP and we wanted to make it painless for them to cut and paste press releases, public company blogs, and the like.
What do you think of the St. Martin's Handbook ?
That’s a different category of book, I think.

I haven’t used St. Martin’s, but it looks most similar to Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, which I recommend.

the preface to the third edition St Martin's Handbook says that the primary driving motivation for the book is "solving writing problems that students really have." The book includes six chapters on research writing, specifically. CMS on the other hand I had heard of as a standard for newspapers and big journalism, as well as research writing (5000 rules of footnotes, etc).

Sections in St Martin's include: - Attention to good writing, not just to surface correctness. - Systematic attention to reading. - Practical guidelines for recognizing, understanding and revising the most common errors. - A look at language in everyday use. - Six chapters on research writing. - Attention to the needs of basic writers.

Yes, that sounds like a different category from Chicago. Same category as Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

I flipped open Chicago to an arbitrary page, and it was describing how to refer to decades—whether you say ’90s or nineties or 1990s. It had rules for whether to use an apostrophe, whether to capitalize, and whether to spell out or use numerals.

Came in real handy once when the odd Harvard PhD I worked with insisted I had written something improperly. She was so confident that was beginning to feel like I had lost my mind. This book told me that no, no, she was the incorrect one. (iirc it was capitalization of certain words in a title or along those lines)
Depending exactly on what you are referring to, this could have been an AP vs Chicago thing. Neither is wrong (or correct) in a vacuum, but, your editors should pick one style guide and adhere to it. Hopefully they will point you towards the style guide when you have disagreement over a correction instead of keeping you guessing, of course.
Chicago is he ultimate style guide and reference for nearly any kind of writing.

Well, this puts me another edition behind. Should I update the 11th edition sitting on my shelf that belonged to my late father in law?

Just checked and it dates to 1949 (my printing 1952). That's old enough that the address listed for the University of Chicago Press is "Chicago 37".

Is this available as a pdf? Or just yet another online subscription if you want to search it quickly? Part of the reason I never bothered with the 17th Edition was that I couldn't find a searchable pdf version (I last tried looking for one years ago though). That and they deprecated the use of ibid, which made me sad.
The article does mention this link: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/dam/jcr:bba47b07-61ba-4...

as a "fascimile" edition that's free.

Is the CMS from 1906 still useful today? I don't know who proportion of stylistic mores have changed since then.
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/dam/jcr:bba47b07-61ba-4...

Seems like it's this one.

I guess I should have specified a pdf of the 18th edition!
Linked PDF says Copyright 1906, and I see no edition number -- apparently the first.
The editors's assumed readership is authors preparing for reproduction with full access to capabilities of a printing press:

> 75. SET IN SMALLER TYPE. Ordinarily, all prose extracts which will make three or more lines in the smaller type, and all poetry citations of two lines or more. An isolated prose quotation, even though its length would bring it under this rule, may properly be run into the text, if it bears an organic relation to the argument pre- sented. On the other hand, a quotation of one or two lines which is closely preceded or followed by longer extracts, set in smaller type, may likewise be reduced, as a matter of uniform appearance

This although the mimeograph (for copying pages from a typewriter) was already in use: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph

.. the one from 1906
We believe in the old gods and we only read the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as well.
does this mean "is this available as a pdf for no money and copyable?"

The book publishing industry is unrecognizable economically from what it was 25 years ago. Many people here have no idea, dont care and maybe worse. It is important to note that the book publishing industry also had its own excesses, some warranted and many not. A staple of publishing like this Chicago Manual of Style was used and abused to generate excess profits no doubt about it. The college textbook industry was (and still is) an eggregious offender for economic dark patterns.

All said, a no-cost PDF of this book is not the answer in the long term IMHO, economics and all considered. (USA here)

I'll gladly pay for a copy. Pretty much everything I write uses the Chicago style (I'm a historian), I just want something easily searchable and still usable without an internet connection.

I love buying physical books, and could get one of the 18th edition, but for reference material like this it's much quicker to search a digital copy, especially since I know all the basics of the style and it's the more obscure edge cases I'll need to find.