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Old 09-01-2009, 02:28 PM   #61
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Originally Posted by Bob Russell View Post
When reading an e-book, it's very hard to get an idea of how thick or long a book is.

But when you read an e-book, how is one to know how long the book is?
With Sony Reader it is easy peasy. It is one of the main reasons why I use Sony Reader and don't want to use anything else. It has page numbers.
All books created by me with a base font 10, I divide by 1.5 and it is a hard back edition length.
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Old 09-01-2009, 02:33 PM   #62
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I go by pagecount on my Sony, e.g. 300 pages is short, 600 is average and 1000 is on the thick side.
BTW, the picture in the first post is 404.
Absolutely agree.

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When I want to find out how many more pages are in the chapter, I bump out to the TOC and see where the next chapter starts. From there, just hit the Menu key and the Continue Reading button
That's what I do very often.

Last edited by astra; 09-01-2009 at 02:35 PM.
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Old 09-01-2009, 02:40 PM   #63
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Old 09-01-2009, 04:02 PM   #64
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Word count really doesn't work.

"Hey, check out words 2,388 to 2,902!" instead of "check out pages 24, 25 (medium font setting)"

"Crap, my bookmarks got deleted... what page was I on? oh wait, no pages, just words... I was on word 5000... maybe..."

So yeah, for a holistic "how large is this book?" then word counts may work, but not for anything else.
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Old 09-01-2009, 04:06 PM   #65
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First of all page numbers are completely moronic. Pages are different sizes and with different margins and different font sizes and different spacings etc, so they are extremely misleading both in p and e. The only reason for having "page" numbers in e is because people are used to them, no matter how misleading they are.

So what alternatives do we have? We have (at least) paragraph counts, word counts and character counts, with SI prefixes (e.g., "3 kchars" = "3000 chars"). I very strongly prefer character count, because it properly reflects the real size, and works well with different languages (and with different use patterns within the same language). E.g., what might be said with 15 words in Swedish or English might be said in 7 words in Finnish, but the latter are longer. (E.g., "med min bil" in Swedish ("with my car" in English) is "autollani" in Finnish.)
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Old 09-01-2009, 04:08 PM   #66
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellimist View Post
"Crap, my bookmarks got deleted... what page was I on? oh wait, no pages, just words... I was on word 5000... maybe..." So yeah, for a holistic "how large is this book?" then word counts may work, but not for anything else.

Even in printed books you'd have to refer to a specific edition to use "page" in a meaningful way. Eventually, we'll just tell our reading system to send your reading system the link/bookmark. Until then, we'll have to make do with "that part with the blue one, next to the fish, about halfway through".
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Old 09-01-2009, 04:09 PM   #67
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellimist View Post
Word count really doesn't work.

"Hey, check out words 2,388 to 2,902!" instead of "check out pages 24, 25 (medium font setting)"

"Crap, my bookmarks got deleted... what page was I on? oh wait, no pages, just words... I was on word 5000... maybe..."

So yeah, for a holistic "how large is this book?" then word counts may work, but not for anything else.
that is ez to fix.. when you make ref to group of text just cut off some char..

if we dont like refrencing word number we could just start saying look at word 23k to 29k (need a term for this. word count page(wcp), maybe vtral page(vp))


ha look at this book wcp23-29. im on wcp 30 right now.
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Old 09-01-2009, 04:18 PM   #68
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellimist View Post
Word count really doesn't work.
Sure it does.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellimist View Post
"Hey, check out words 2,388 to 2,902!" instead of "check out pages 24, 25 (medium font setting)"
"Medium"?? Are you kidding?! Your medium or my medium? With your font or with mine? On a big reader or on a small one? With your margins or with mine? With your line spacings or with mine? Etc, ad infinitum.

How about "Hey, check out kwords 6.0-6.3!" (or "Hey, check out hwords 60-63!", which is exactly the same)?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellimist View Post
"Crap, my bookmarks got deleted... what page was I on? oh wait, no pages, just words... I was on word 5000... maybe..."
How is "I was on kword 5... maybe.." different from "I was on page 20... maybe.."?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellimist View Post
So yeah, for a holistic "how large is this book?" then word counts may work, but not for anything else.
Wrong. They work as well or better than pages in every way I can imagine.
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Old 09-01-2009, 08:38 PM   #69
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For me word count has always been a better indicator of the length of a book than pages or weight. Then again there are books where the prose is so thick that even 10 pages will seem like 100,000 words. Pages as a measure is flawed because it is only valid if all books have the same font at the same size with the same leading on the same page form and with the same margins.

One of my jobs back in high school was working as a typesetter (yes, hand set type.) The printer specialized in limited run fine poetry books. The paper was also high quality. If we printed 500 of a book it was considered a long run. There will always be a market for this type of book. The skills of typesetting and fine printing will not go away.

The printing in most mass market books and many trade books is cheap. ("Cheap" used as a quality designator, not a price designator.) The type and margins are scaled to fit a folded folio number of pages to keep costs down. The fonts are low quality designed to survive the questionable ink and rough paper used in their production. Textbooks however, generally utilize quality fonts and high grade paper. Most have a superior binding designed to survive hard use.

The worst offenders I have found were the computer books. (Note: O'Riley books are not included in this grouping.) Many of them were written in haste and then the page layouts were done by someone that did not have a clue as to the content of the text. Add to this the selection of a "hip" font that causes eye strain after a page or two and you have a winning combination.

With e-books I have been able to change the base font to one that I like and is easy on my eyes. The Dutch font Sony shipped with the PRS-500 Reader is a fine font (and a better font than Times New Roman that shipped with Windows or the Times font that comes with Mac.) I am not sure what options I have or will have with ePub but that is in the future for me, not the present.

Using an electronic reader I can judge a book by its merits without being distracted by a madman graphic designer out to show the world his or her vision of greatness.
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Old 09-02-2009, 11:19 AM   #70
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Word Count is like the metric system for Americans.

When someone refers to a book with a 100,000 word count or a 40,000 word count we don't really know what that means. What is the word count of The Old Man and Sea? 20,000? 40,000? How about Atlas Shrugged? 100,000? 200,000? I don't have a clue.

If we used this system all the time we would get used to it, and it may be better than the current system, but right now it would be like asking me to use liters, grams, and millimeters when I think in terms of gallons, ounces, and inches.

Last edited by Daithi; 09-02-2009 at 11:22 AM.
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Old 09-02-2009, 11:23 AM   #71
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Originally Posted by Abecedary View Post
When I want to find out how many more pages are in the chapter, I bump out to the TOC and see where the next chapter starts. From there, just hit the Menu key and the Continue Reading button (this is the sequence on the 505, not sure about other readers). It takes maybe 5 to 10 seconds--a tiny bit longer than it would take to flip through the paper book to find the end of the chapter.
I don't know why this never occurred to me. Great (logical) idea!
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Old 09-02-2009, 11:31 AM   #72
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I guess the problem I've always had with page numbering in a fiction ebook is that if I'm so bored by the story that I feel compelled to discover just how far I've read and how far it is to the next chapter - then that's a good sign the story isn't worth the read.

There are far too many GOOD novels out there which suck me into the story deeply enough that I don't even really notice what chapter I'm on. And with all these great reads out there, I don't have time to waste on a story that doesn't reach that level.

Now if you want to talk about non-fiction books and page-numbering, well, the situation is completely different!

Derek
For the record, some of the best novels out there have some less interesting parts that may or may not contribute to a big pay off later. Personally, if I only read books that I never got bored with, I would have missed out on a lot of GREAT novels.
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Old 09-02-2009, 11:36 AM   #73
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Now that's something I'd like to be able to turn on in an e-book reader: a CHAPTER progress meter.

I expect I'm practically alone on this.
This would be wonderful. I think I'd like to see flexibility more than anything else. A progress bar would be great, but I'd also like to know how many words are in a book. Some sort of standard measure for a "page" could work as well, but I think it would be too confusing. I'd like the option to "do it all." My idea is dual progress bars: one showing overall progress and the other showing chapter progress. Maybe you could even add numbers to the left and right of each bar showing how many pages come before and after the current page. It would look something like this

150***----200
010******-002

The top line shows that you've read 150 "screen pages" (at the current font size) The astericks represent the "full" (read) portion of the progress bar, and the dashes represent the empty (unread) portion. The number on the left represents the number of "screen pages" left. The lower bar is the same, but it represents current chapter/section progress. I put zeros before the smaller numbers only for the sake of aligning the bars, but in practice this shouldn't be necessary.
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Old 09-02-2009, 12:51 PM   #74
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My idea is dual progress bars: one showing overall progress and the other showing chapter progress. Maybe you could even add numbers to the left and right of each bar showing how many pages come before and after the current page.
Something like what I use in my PDFs (like this one)?

If you don't want to open it, in the header area, on top of the page, there are two bars, the top one the whole page width and has a dark portion that grows larger as you progress on the book; the bottom one is made out of constant-size blocks, each of them represents a page of the current chapter, each block is darkened as you turn to the next page.
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Old 09-02-2009, 12:53 PM   #75
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My Sony shows a page count (x of y) at the bottom for the font size selected. The Mobipocket Reader on my Palm equipped cell phone has a progress bar along the bottom for the one font size available.
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