Page numbers in ebooks for scholarly research?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by NatCh

You're right, we've kinda evolved two parallel discussions, how to do it presently as an add on, and how it might best be done as a considered system.

The considered system and the present is colliding fast. We do need to fix this in epub I believe. I think the epub standard could have a meta file with the data in it to match page numbers for the real book and some standard proposed eBook sizes. This would allow scholarly research and improve the reading experience for eBook reader who want to know how many pages are in the book, what page they are on and when the next chapter starts. All can be accomplished with a pre-pagination file that is in the mix of files in the standard already. This would be an index like file that cross referenced page boundaries to xhtml files and locations in the files.

Dale

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by NatCh

You're right, we've kinda evolved two parallel discussions, how to do it presently as an add on, and how it might best be done as a considered system.

That was my intent. How can we deal with this now and how could it be done better in the future? If we can get the standards setting folks (IDPF and others) thinking about these issues now, perhaps it won't be too terribly long before we have a better, standard way to do these things.

Ebooks need to grow in incapability beyond just recreational reading. PDF is being used now, because it is essentially a paper representation of what we already have. We need other solutions for use with reflowable formats.

Since it seems we all agree that paragraph numbers are probably the best we can do with today's reflowable ebook formats, we still have the question of how to use them without making them too obnoxious and in-your-face to the average reader.

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The considered system and the present is colliding fast. We do need to fix this in epub I believe. I think the epub standard could have a meta file with the data in it to match page numbers for the real book and some standard proposed eBook sizes. This would allow scholarly research and improve the reading experience for eBook reader who want to know how many pages are in the book, what page they are on and when the next chapter starts. All can be accomplished with a pre-pagination file that is in the mix of files in the standard already. This would be an index like file that cross referenced page boundaries to xhtml files and locations in the files.

Dale

I agree that the epub folks need to address this and other issues. I like your idea of a meta file. There is nothing preventing its incorporation into an existing epub. However, as the standard doesn't address this issue, the use of this data would be entirely dependent on how or if the reader made use of it.

As to predefined page sizes, that somewhat negates the benefits of a reflowable format and still ties us to the archaic concept of a page. Besides, you might read a particular epub on anything from a smart phone, to a 22 inch widescreen monitor. When you add in the different font sizes that might be used for reading, it adds up to a lot of combinations. And if only a certain subset of these combinations was in the specification, that also limits what you can do with a reflowable format.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by jbenny

Since it seems we all agree that paragraph numbers are probably the best we can do with today's reflowable ebook formats, we still have the question of how to use them without making them too obnoxious and in-your-face to the average reader.

In business use the number looks something like 1.1.1 where the dots are used to separate the levels with a variable number of dots and the least significant (one on the right) number is the paragraph number. Section numbers have less depth.

To find such a paragraph there needs to be a goto menu item same as used today to goto a page number.

To display this data really is a reader issue and there can be no predefined method to do it. In some documents it is setting at the start of the paragraph as a lead in. Professional tools like Framemaker can auto generate a document like this. It could be display as a optional setting in the control panel and turned on or off as needed by the user. If the device has a touch screen it can be implemented as a tap or gesture. For menu driven systems it could be done by selecting a menu item which would then display the number based on the cursor location and up/down arrows could be used to move the cursor location by paragraph.

As you can see there is no best way to implement the viewing but the idea that it exists is what has to be sold so that the tool can figure out that they need to do it. The database is likely to need to include a reference similar to the pre-pagination I have mentioned before so it does need to be in the standard.

Dale

[bowerbird]

i'm sure the standards people would just love to
hear from someone who hadn't thought about this
up until a few days ago. fresh perspective, and all.

because i get the feeling the people at adobe have
never thought about this issue before, you know?

-bowerbird

[jbenny]

Using epub as an example, one relatively simple way to do this would be to have two different stylesheets. One that displayed the chapter/section/paragraph numbering and one that hid it. The numbering information could be included in the text, but only displayed when using the proper stylesheet.

The problem with this is that I don't see how you can change stylesheets, as the epub standard doesn't support any scripting or programability. Using the standard as-is, you could provide a top level item in the TOC that allowed selecting either version. But without the ability to switch stylesheets, you would have to also provide two copies of the content, with the only difference being which stylesheet it linked to. Not ideal, but workable and relatively simple to implement.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

i'm sure the standards people would just love to
hear from someone who hadn't thought about this
up until a few days ago. fresh perspective, and all.

because i get the feeling the people at adobe have
never thought about this issue before, you know?

-bowerbird

funny you should mention Adobe which had good foresight a long time ago and seems to have lost their way. PDF was originally a print format and like pagemaker and earlier Post Script is a page oriented format. Keeping page numbers is practically automatic but still the reader that tries to report the page you are on gets it wrong as compared to the paper document since they weren't foresighted enough to realize that the fist page of the electronic document is not page one of the paper document. It is frustrating to try a reference a page number from a pdf without looking on the page itself to see if it is listed.

Dale

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

i'm sure the standards people would just love to
hear from someone who hadn't thought about this
up until a few days ago. fresh perspective, and all.

because i get the feeling the people at adobe have
never thought about this issue before, you know?

-bowerbird

Bowerbird, if you can't do anything but criticize, then take your comments elsewhere. This is just a friendly discussion and whether the standards-setting folks take any notice or not is up to them. Unlike you, we don't think we know everything and have all the answers.

[wallcraft]

I was under the impression that .epub can already handle "physical pages" via its toc.ncx file. From The NCX:

The user will also have the option of navigating to items that do not fit easily into the hierarchical structure of a document, e.g., pages, footnotes, or sidebars. This function is provided by pageList (for pages) and navList (for all other non-hierarchical objects).

This does not solve how to come up with pages, but it does provide a standard way to reference them in the e-book.

I would really like e-book readers to use physical (normative?) page numbers, e.g. in their navigation bar, when they are available. Since on small screens the e-book page count gets too large to be useful.

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

I was under the impression that .epub can already handle "physical pages" via its toc.ncx file. From The NCX:

This does not solve how to come up with pages, but it does provide a standard way to reference them in the e-book.

I would really like e-book readers to use physical (normative?) page numbers, e.g. in their navigation bar, when they are available. Since on small screens the e-book page count gets too large to be useful.

I must have missed that on my initial read-through of the spec. There is actually quite a bit in there. I'll have to take a closer look. Thanks for pointing this out.

OK, I see that you were referencing the DTBook spec, which is incorporated into the epub spec. The documentation on the IDPF site glosses over some of this. Thanks again for pointing to the full DTBook spec.

[sartori]

I've been playing around with representing print versions online as faithfully as possible see sample. Unfortunately I can't see any way this would translate into a reflowable page size.

(This is just a sample and was more of an experiment to see how it could be done)

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by sartori

I've been playing around with representing print versions online as faithfully as possible see sample. Unfortunately I can't see any way this would translate into a reflowable page size.

(This is just a sample and was more of an experiment to see how it could be done)

Very nice! I'm impressed. That must have taken a lot of work to dupicate the original.

[sartori]

Ok, been playing around with adding paragraph markers to my sample as suggested earlier in this thread. Just a quick question - do any of the current html->lrf converters respect css hidden properties? If so it wouldn't be too hard to created a library of books that display paged as in my example but then you could easily convert them to lrf and ignore page numbers, etc. (It would be time consuming but not difficult).

This could almost become a master library that looks good online for people doing research and referencing certain sections/pages but also great for those who want to just read them on their portable device.

[bowerbird]

jbenny said:
> Bowerbird, if you can't do anything but criticize,
> then take your comments elsewhere.

gee, i hope you're not _criticizing_ me, or you can "take it elsewhere"...

besides, i think "criticizing" is a _lot_ better way to get to the bottom
of a topic than blowing sunshine up someone's behind. don't you?

plus, as if it is the case that "the only thing" i am doing is "criticizing".
i invite anyone to take a look at the 3 posts of mine that i linked to.
you will find more meat in them than in this "new thread" combined...

or look at the post of mine in this "new thread" that mentions ted nelson
and you'll find more meat there than all the other posts here combined.

but, you know, have a nice day, and all... :+)

-bowerbird

[bowerbird]

sartori said:
> I've been playing around with representing print versions
> online as faithfully as possible see sample.

nice example. good work. thank you very much.

is it time-consuming? could you do all 612 pages?'

-bowerbird