Page numbers (again)

[Prospect]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

And your points 1 and 2 remind me of something. Some people should not be allowed to read. There should be a government agency whose job it is to ensure that only licensed readers are allowed to peruse fiction books. The licensing should be tough. Anyone who fails to figure out that reading fiction is for enjoyment should be denied licenses - and any chance of bringing children into this world.
Derek

I agree with the bringing children into this world part, but to be denied reading fiction is IMHO too harsh.

Referencing to a precise location in an ebook is not a feature request from the typical leisure reader. But that is only one possible use of an ereader among other.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Prospect

I agree with the bringing children into this world part, but to be denied reading fiction is IMHO too harsh.

Referencing to a precise location in an ebook is not a feature request from the typical leisure reader. But that is only one possible use of an ereader among other.

Okay. I'll grant you that it is a possible 'feature' some readers may want. Now let me explain something. Not every 'feature' requested by some (or one) user is necessarily appropriate for any given application. (Can you tell I've worked for pointy-haired bosses as a programmer? Does it show? )

Derek

[Prospect]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Okay. I'll grant you that it is a possible 'feature' some readers may want. Now let me explain something. Not every 'feature' requested by some (or one) user is necessarily appropriate for any given application. (Can you tell I've worked for pointy-haired bosses as a programmer? Does it show? )

Derek

My purpose with this thread was to argue that page numbering is something the world needs, and to find out if others agrees or not. If your pointed-haired bosses gets ideas to easily you should consider limiting their surfing privileges. My impression so far is that this is something some pople wants and some others for reasons that for me are unclear have strong aversions against.

If it is not implemented as a feature in reader software, my quess is that some publishers will go ahead and embed page numbers (or paragraph numbers) directly into the text of the page in order to make their books (other than Harry Potter) suitable for their audience. That would not be a good solution.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Prospect

Jon:
I am not familiar with the page numbering features of the Sony Reader. How does it work? If they solve both my point 1 & 2 they should be implemented in all formats and readers. If not we need something better. My point is that page numbering should be consistent on different readers and formats and that this is not archived by referring to the number of pages actually displayed on one particular device using one particular font size. This is of course not the single most important feature for e-reading.

If say the Gen3 was to implement page numbers, they would not be the same as the 505 based on things like different fonts, different font size, margins, headers, etc.. But, page numbers do work well on the 505. If you have an internal ToC, you can see the page numbers for the start of the different chapters. And that changes to fit when you change the font size.

[moz]

What I'm doing when I scan books is including page numbers as ID's on paragraph tags since I use HTML as my master copy. This means that the page number might be off by a paragraph, but it will be close enough to work as a reference. I'm not currently including a list of links to the page numbers in the file, they're more there if I want to make an index later. Plus, of course, some of them are missing since my scan+OCR process misses a few and fiction books often leave out numbers on chapter heading pages.

I don't currently make an opf with publication details - is there a good tool for editing that? What other information is left out of the HTML? I don't put cover scans in the file but I keep them with the book (I want not to have the cover scans in the lrf on my reader).

[wallcraft]

Some, but not all, Baen ebooks already include explicit paragraph numbers. For example, the start and end of The Mountains of Mourning:

<a id="p0" name="p0"></a><p onmouseover="PNo(0)">Miles heard the woman weeping ...
<a id="p706" name="p706"></a><p onmouseover="PNo(706)">He knew who he served now.

So far as I can tell, these are not used.

I agree with kovidgoyal that paragraph numbers are best for referencing, and should always be available (particularly as they are easy to generate).

The only argument for page numbers is that they are about the right size for humans to deal with, and here I am talking about physical book pages. I know that some people strongly object to device independent "page" sizes for ebooks, but I like FBReader's approach of defining a page as a fixed number of characters. One way to think of this is as another way of representing the fraction of the book read, but in people friendly units. The Kindle has a similar scheme, but its quantum is way too small - leading to huge "page" counts.

[moz]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

I agree with kovidgoyal that paragraph numbers are best for referencing, and should always be available (particularly as they are easy to generate).

One problem I'm finding as I rip more books is that while easy to generate, paragraph numbers are not necessarily accurate. Often there's a combination of variable quoting and paragraphs in the original text that means I spend a bit of time working out exactly how paragraphs should break, and my decisions are obviously not the only ones that could be made. That's fine for a few occurrences, but in "Pushing Ice" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Ice) there's a lot of speech and so even a low proportion of errors will see the paragraph count off by as much as the error rate. So 5% might mean that paragraph 1000 is actually paragraph 1050, or 950, depending on which way it goes.

Made up example:
'...and that's the story.
'But which way do we go?' he asked.

Is that one paragraph or two? If the first line is just before a page break and the second just after, it's not necessarily obvious. You have to read through and guess which character(s) spoke, and deal with the missing quote in your own way.

These corrections are easy enough for me to do now, since I have the original images and can check against them. If you got a passage like that off the net you'd have no chance. It's not helped by lax typography, which a genuine instance of ".' '" in one book I read - I'd normally hit that with a regex to insert a paragraph marker but when I found it in the book it was unusual enough that I wrote it down as a reminder. After some consideration, I decided that it was not actually a proofing error in the book and should be left as is, or (as I did) have the quotes removed.

Also, remember that between unicode and html we have something like 8 or 10 paragraph markers to choose from.

That said, I think paragraph markers are the least awful standard.

[brecklundin]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

How many times is this going to be rehashed!! It's almost as bad as DRM.

1. Page numbers are archaic, the only possible reason to support them is to refer to pbooks that don't have an e-version

2. References of sufficient granularity can be achieved using paragraph numbers (and please don't trot out the three isolated examples where paragraph numbers don't work). The only software support needed for this is to make e-book reader software that can display an overlay of automatically generated paragraph numbers.

there ya go. I was thinking along the lines of something like hard coded "positon reference" tags that could be used as part of the formatting code. But increasing it to the pargraph level of granularity is even better. Unless of course some , ahem, author, decides it would be funny to have a 1000 sentence paragraph.

Heck for books that essentially use HTML the adding of a value for the "id" value of the html tags is already there for the taking, no extra custom stuff needed.

EDIT: well, maybe the ID tag might not be ideal...some books might already use it for other uses so using it as a way to ID paragraphs would likely cause a mess...custom tags to the rescue I guess.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I personally regard page numbers as an artifact of paper books which have no place in the eBook world.

I agree they have no place when the text is a continuous flow that is scrolled, as in most webpages. But in current eBook (eInk) readers, the text is shown one "page" at a time, so it makes as much sense to have page numbers as in paper books.

Sure, the page numbers can change among devices or as one changes the settings in a single device... but page numbers also change from paperback to hardcover, from illustrated to commented editions, from the original to translations... So page numbers are sometimes not that useful in paper books. Even for estimating how much of the book has been read, one has physical size in paper books.

I say that, as long as the text is displayed in "pages", one may wish to have page numbers, for whatever reason. Even for (informal) referencing, saying "page 217 of 582" is probably more useful than "about one third of the book".

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I agree they have no place when the text is a continuous flow that is scrolled, as in most webpages. But in current eBook (eInk) readers, the text is shown one "page" at a time, so it makes as much sense to have page numbers as in paper books.

Sure, the page numbers can change among devices or as one changes the settings in a single device... but page numbers also change from paperback to hardcover, from illustrated to commented editions, from the original to translations... So page numbers are sometimes not that useful in paper books. Even for estimating how much of the book has been read, one has physical size in paper books.

I say that, as long as the text is displayed in "pages", one may wish to have page numbers, for whatever reason. Even for (informal) referencing, saying "page 217 of 582" is probably more useful than "about one third of the book".

However, text isn't displayed on e-ink readers as distinct pages. Nope, it's more like the text and images are displayed as one giant scroll of paper, but you're only being allowed to view it through a porthole that jumps ahead X lines at a time. (X being determined by the font family and font size selected.)

Derek

[tompe]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

However, text isn't displayed on e-ink readers as distinct pages. Nope, it's more like the text and images are displayed as one giant scroll of paper, but you're only being allowed to view it through a porthole that jumps ahead X lines at a time. (X being determined by the font family and font size selected.)

On my reader the text is displayed as distinct pages since I use both header and footer. And you can only move one page at the time.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

However, text isn't displayed on e-ink readers as distinct pages. Nope, it's more like the text and images are displayed as one giant scroll of paper, but you're only being allowed to view it through a porthole that jumps ahead X lines at a time. (X being determined by the font family and font size selected.)

Derek

It may not technically be pages as in a pBook. But, it sure looks like it and feels like it with the "page" turn buttons. And we know the Gen3 has page numbers for the eBook being read. Interally it does otherwise the goto page would not work. Why not just display them and make everyone happy.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

On my reader the text is displayed as distinct pages since I use both header and footer. And you can only move one page at the time.

But the pages aren't "fixed". Eg, jump to any hyperlink on the Gen3 and the jump destination ends up at the top of the page. You finish up with a different page start to what you'd have if you went there a page at a time.

Contrast that to the Sony. The Sony does "real" pagination, and when you jump to a hyperlink the destination of the jump is wherever it "should" be on that page.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But the pages aren't "fixed". Eg, jump to any hyperlink on the Gen3 and the jump destination ends up at the top of the page. You finish up with a different page start to what you'd have if you went there a page at a time.

Contrast that to the Sony. The Sony does "real" pagination, and when you jump to a hyperlink the destination of the jump is wherever it "should" be on that page.

Most links are to the top of the page. The only thing I have used links for is jumping to the start of a short story or the start of a novel in a collection and that use keeps the impression of pages.

[HarryT]

Quite a few of the books I've created have footnotes (eg the Rider Haggard books tend to have a lot of footnotes). What I always do is move them all to the end of the book, and create a hyperlink from the reference in the text to the relevent footnote (although I suppose "endnote" would be a more accurate term). On the Sony version of the book, the footnote you jump to might be half way down the page; on the Mobi version, the text you jump to is always at the top of the page.

As you say, for chapter links, etc, where you want to be at the top of a page anyway, there's no difference.

That's why, though, when you add new books to the Sony it grinds away for a minute or so when you first open the book, or first select a new font size - it's paginating the book. Mobi devices don't do "real" pagination.