Chapter markers: why oh why do so many books not have them?

[foghat]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

So can someone enlighten me as to how seeing where the chapters are (or being able to tippy-tap to the next/previous chapter with a button) would be an advantage to this novel reader -- who only reads books once? What intense joy am I so obviously missing out on?
:

I too, could care less about quickly getting to from one chapter to another and do not lose my place in a book (though it has come in handy once or twice). For me it is simple: I like to know about how far I have to go to get to the end of a chapter, as I typically won't stop reading in the middle of a chapter. Also, the chapter marker spacing gives you an idea of how long a given chapter is (relatively speaking) - which helps with the decision: should I read one more before I turn in?

True pbooks don't have chapter markers, but it is far easier to flip through the pages of a pbook to see how much further you have in the chapter. And, pbooks don't have selectable fonts or font sizes or a built in dictionary - doesn't mean I can't appreciate those features in an ebook (yes I know it is the reader and not the book that has these options).

[DiapDealer]

That's the most relevant reason I've heard yet, foghat. Thanks for pointing it out.
I don't worry about where I stop reading, but I can see how it would be handy for those that do. I mistakenly assumed that people who absolutely require chapter markers were using them for navigation.

[st_albert]

well, late to the discussion (as often happens) but nevertheless:

I produce ebook formats for a small publisher of very high quality fiction (mostly) if I say so myself.

I certainly hope that none of my books are at issue here! Actually, I'm pretty confident that they are not. Here's my workflow, somewhat abbreviated.

We start with the print book, imposed in InDesign, and export it to epub.

Then, I seriously edit the ID epub to make it conform to our standards. That includes properly dividing the text, imposing our house epub styles, and other kinds of cleanup. This results in an intermediate epub that is further edited in sigil. After sigil, the epub is further edited by hand to add the last touches to the .opf file, as needed. After this, we have a valid epub for production.

For mobi, however, we have to edit further and add the inline TOC (xhtml version) and mess with the cover image. Then we use kindlegen to generate the mobi format. If necessary, we strip the input files from the mobi to reduce its size so as to limit download charges.

Testing of the output includes, of course, ADE for the epub, and both Mobi and Kindle previewers for the mobi versions. In the Kindle viewer, I specifically check the chapter markers. They come from the toc.ncx as I understand it, and that is always present and should always work.

For folks that produce mobi files that don't work, I can't say. Our process should always work. In the case where it doesn't meet your expectatons, I strongly urge you to send an email to the publisher to complain (address within the ebook, naturally). Otherwise, I'll assume I'm doing it right.

And no, it ain't rocket science.

[foghat]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That's the most relevant reason I've heard yet, foghat. Thanks for pointing it out.
I don't worry about where I stop reading, but I can see how it would be handy for those that do. I mistakenly assumed that people who absolutely require chapter markers were using them for navigation.

I hear you. I'm a little anal that way, I suppose.

When you get into your epic length novels, the markers become less useful as there are so many of them and they are often spaced so close together. But still they help enough.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

So can someone enlighten me as to how seeing where the chapters are (or being able to tippy-tap to the next/previous chapter with a button) would be an advantage to this novel reader -- who only reads books once?

Well, obviously this won't apply to people who only read novels once, but I find that upon re-reads, it's nice to be able to flick back and forth to easily skip to a favourite section which I kinda sorta remember was somewhere around here-ish, especially if the chapters in the TOC don't have names (or I can't remember what happens inside).

Possibly if you read a lot of short story collections flickable marks would also come in handy so you could skip past boring stories without having to hit the TOC to navigate to each new one to try and see if you liked it any better than the last.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm thinking that the main reason you don't see chapter markers in all Amazon books is the simple fact that a relatively small portion of readers really, truly give a hoot about "speed referencing".

Personally, I just chalk it up to incompetence and/or deficiencies in the tools use to create the Mobi version.

I've got plenty of those time-limited promotional freebies from multiple stores, and often the ePub will have a proper NCX that converts to chapter marks (occasionally requiring a bit of tweaking to make sure KindleGen "reads" it right) whereas the officially-supplied Amazon Mobi (or Topaz) doesn't.

KindleGen can be stupidly picky about both NCX and OPF and won't even give you a warning if it thinks something's "wrong" with the inclusion of the former within the latter; just merrily create a new chapter-mark-free Mobi.

[DMSmillie]

Going to add another use for those "chapter marks", and the ability to flick forward to the start of the next chapter with a single keypress:

I see a lot of people saying that something they really want is the ability to see how many "pages" there are from where they currently are in a book to the start of the next chapter. For example, so they can judge how much time before they get there - should they just close the book and go to sleep now, or read on to the end of the chapter - that kind of thing. With chapter marks, you simply note the page/location number at your current location, skip forward to the beginning of the next chapter to see the page/location number at that point, then press the BACK button to return to where you were.

Of course, doing that will mess with the Kindle's "furthest point read" marker, but then so will laboriously paging forward to see how far it is to the end of the chapter. Having the chapter marks present simply makes it quicker and easier to do, if that happens to be something that matters to you. Which, from posts in other threads about page numbers, it appears it does to many people.

[emalvick]

I like Chapter Markers for a lot of the reasons stated as I also tend to like locations in conjunction with those reasons... i.e. it gives me an idea of how far I need to get to the next chapter, and/or it helps me to navigate to a short story as I like to read short stories when reading time is short (makes sense).

When reading print books, I was the guy who never used a bookmark but rather remember what chapter I was on and flipped to it each time I picked the book up. That actually worked quite well, and I've had to use it a couple of times with my Kindle when I've accidentally hit the BACK button too many times. Unfortunately, there have been times when I didn't have chapter markers and resorted to estimating my location number as best I could, based on percentage or last notice of a location number. These are times when those chapter numbers come in the most handy and useful.