"Locations" vs. Pages in K3 - AAAAAAAH!

[wesleyer]

Originally Posted by a_str8

From what I understand, 1 location unit is 128 characters. That's 2^8 bits -

[pedant mode on] 2^7 bytes, actually [pedant mode off]

[karthwyne]

Well, since it seems that the other side is never heard from, I love locations and think they are a wonderful solution. Pages would make ZERO sense in such a variable environment.

[ChaoZ]

Each publisher would need to insert tags (via XML or HTML anchors?) where each page ends. There may be a problem doing that automatically. I'm not entirely sure of the application used to lay out a book, but that functionality would have to be built in. (As long as you're doing that, you may as well add in the capability to display a footnote on the same page as it appears instead of hyperlinking).

Right now, I don't think publishers even have font sizes, styles or justification down pat yet, from what I've seen so far.

[a_str8]

Originally Posted by wesleyer

[pedant mode on] 2^7 bytes, actually [pedant mode off]

oops

Based on what I'm reading here and a quick glance through some of my books, it seems that dropping the last digit will give you a good estimate of hardcover and trade paperback pages. For mass market paperback, you have to drop the last zero and then divide by 2. In all cases so far, it seems that using these estimates will give you slightly shorter pages than you'll find in physical books.

Let me know if these estimates match up with what you're reading

[DiapDealer]

Oh, I have no beef with locations either. They make perfect sense to pinpoint a precise position within a book that can be read on different devices with different screen sizes that use different fonts/words per line/margins settings, etc.

I'd be pissed if I clicked the 'Next' button three times and the page number stayed the same.

[TenaciousBadger]

i was really hoping there were some standard guidelines out there (like maybe Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, anyone! of prestige) so i could convince my technophobic professor "it's okay, see? they do this, too" but i don't think it's going to pass mustard with him.
scientific referencing needs to be precise and more importantly standardized.
all guidelines i've found so far refer to articles and their urls, even though they say "ebooks."

i was really hoping i could buy the ebook and have it in a couple of seconds rather than go for the more expensive paperback and wait for at least a month for it to get here in the back of beyond (and before you ask, express delivery is a no-go, it's almost the price of the book, sometimes, even above it...)

it's a classical case of the academic world having to catch up with the times.

[c861556]

According to the MLA (Modern Language Association) style for writing and formatting research papers, "when an entry requires that you provide a page but no pages are provided in the source (as in the case of an online-only scholarly journal or a work that appears in an online-only anthology), use the abbreviation n. pag."

Oh, and I believe it's "pass muster".

[Batman Jr.]

F.Y.I., the American Psychological Association (APA) put out these guidelines for academic citations of Kindle content last summer:

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/20...-a-kindle.html

[gca3020]

I think locations are fine. I'm an engineer and have no problem with them. I really only use the percentage bar anyway.

I suspect that people's problems with them stem from the fact that the numbers are so darn big. People are used to p-books where a "long" book is 600-1000 pages. We have a frame of reference for that, and people know approximately how many pages per minute they read.

Now along come locations, and people have all of a sudden lost their frame of reference. If a location was 1280 bytes instead of 128, the numbers would be more sane and people wouldn't mind so much. This might be problematic for whispersync, however, since the granularity goes way down, and pulling up your book on an iPhone now doesn't get you as close to your previous sentence as before.

It's the same reason people (in the US) rebel against the metric system. For example, I know exactly how tall I am, 6 feet 2 inches. If someone were to come up to me and say "oh, he's about 198 centimeters tall" then in my head he seems like a giant at first... the number is big. Likewise, if someone says "2 meters tall", now the person is clearly a midget... the number is small. This feeling of confusion only lasts for a fraction of a second until you do the conversion in your head, but there's confusion nonetheless.

Don't even get me started of F to C conversions. In my world, 35 degrees is freezing cold, and no one will ever be able to convince me that Celcius (centigrade?) makes more sense for weather reports. Chemistry, maybe, but when the difference between a sweltering day and a freezing cold day is only a handful of degrees, the system is broken.

It's all about your frame of reference.

[TheKindleWorm]

I see locations pretty much as I do page numbers really.

If I'm on location 2404-19 out of a max 4859 then I can instantly see without looking at the percentage read that I'm about halfway through my book.

Just look at the number before the hyphen (in this case 2404) and imagine that this is a page number (albeit a large page number) and you've read approx 2404 pages out of 4859.

Perhaps it is the hyphen which is confusing some people. For me, I see no real tangible difference between locations and page numbers - except the big bonus that locations are exactly the same on books read on all Amazon Kindle hardware and apps.

I wish locations were the standard across all ebook devices so it would not matter on what device you read an ebook because citing a location would be the same no matter where you read it.

[grooks]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

So what printed page is Sony's page number based on? Hardcover? Trade Paperback? Mass Market Paperback? US version or UK?

I didn't see a respone to your questions but the answer is one page equals 1024 bytes of content.

I think this is built into ePub formatted books and not specific to Sony but I could be wrong. If one were to change the font size the total number of pages would not change but you have may have multiple screen turns to actually equal one ebook page.

[TenaciousBadger]

Originally Posted by c861556

Oh, and I believe it's "pass muster".

& LOL that's what i was thinking and "mustard" came out

Originally Posted by Batman Jr.

F.Y.I., the American Psychological Association (APA) put out these guidelines for academic citations of Kindle content last summer:

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/20...-a-kindle.html

a gazillion thanks! i was already contemplating my professor's vacant stare and/or the long itinerary of that paperback till it would reach me (i hear a that the space station is at the midpoint of the whole trajectory)

[DiapDealer]

I didn't see a response to your questions but the answer is one page equals 1024 bytes of content.

Thanks for the info, grooks.
So in essence, Sony (or the epub format) chose a different (larger) arbitrary number to represent a "reference point" in a book and gave it the name "page". But it no more corresponds to the actual page number of the printed text than Amazon's "location" does.

So basically, it all boils down to semantics and preference:
Smaller numbers that may stay unchanged for 3,4, or 5 virtual page turns? Or bigger numbers that may have more than one entry on each virtual page?

Flip a coin I'd say... I rarely look at the numbers anyway.

[ylsul]

I purchased a textbook on my Kindle for a class I'm taking. I encountered this problem the first time I tried to read "pages 231-254"

Mind, you, the textbook I got was the same as the paper version (Blabla Textbook 2nd edition blabla). I wonder how hard it would be to map the page numbers from the textbook to the proper regions in the kindle version?

[ski_power]

Originally Posted by gca3020

Don't even get me started of F to C conversions. In my world, 35 degrees is freezing cold, and no one will ever be able to convince me that Celcius (centigrade?) makes more sense for weather reports. Chemistry, maybe, but when the difference between a sweltering day and a freezing cold day is only a handful of degrees, the system is broken.

It's all about your frame of reference.

Yep its a fine 300 Kelvin outside today.