[Faterson]

Art, let's not confuse 2 things here. Calculating the exact number of screens needed to display a book is one thing, and roughly indicating the length of a book is another thing.

The first is difficult to accomplish, and I don't need and don't expect Marvin to accomplish it. (It now does it on a chapter-by-chapter basis, which is fine with me.) The second should not be as difficult to accomplish, because Marvin already is, in fact, doing this. Otherwise, there'd be no way for Marvin to show, as it does now, that you're "16% in the book".

I'm a bit surprised by the difficulties here. I would go by the number of words in a book. It's not an exact criterion because the average number of words per sentence differs between various languages, but for the very limited purpose of showing the appropriate number of dots in Marvin's Library view, "number of words in a book" as criterion should do. I'm reminded of the old Mobipocket Reader software for desktop PCs that even shows "Estimated Reading Time" for every book in Library view. It probably calculates that on the basis of a criterion such as "number of words in a book".

Isn't an EPUB file something like a HTML file? To get the number of words in a HTML-formatted book, you simply need to strip all HTML tags. Whatever remains (plain-text), is the number of words in the e-book, and based on that, a very long e-book might get 25 dots in Marvin's Library view, a moderately long book 15 dots, and a booklet of a few pages perhaps only 3 or 5 dots.