We need to change this situation. Print conventions harbor anomalies that were trivial as long as print was the sole medium of presentation. With print, presentation pertains partly to text and partly to the paper page. As the conventions of print developed, for the most part they soundly integrated text and page layout. A few things got confused, with textual concerns met through page conventions, the most significant of which involves pagination.
Page numbers are attributes of book layout that have nothing integral to do with the text.
Yet, since the early conventions of printing, readers and writers habitually use them to indicate locations in a text. As scholars increasingly work with text both in print and on-line, this anomaly becomes more and more problematic. Quite apart from electronics, any serious user of printed texts has at one time or another encountered the basic problem. The page references do not work and you are left thumbing in frustrated hope that you can chance upon the cited text. That is the basic confusion and its consequences are substantial.