Kobo glo by Fnac : page number display bug

[magic.bretzel]

Hi there,
I have a quite annoying issue with my kobo glo (by fnac, the french version) with non-kobo-made epub ebooks.

The number of pages of a book that is displayed doesn't correspond to the actual number.

Let me explain it:
For example, if I am on page 10, and I goto the next page, the book will properly display the next page but it will still be shown as page number 10. If I turn again for one to three times, it will again show it as page number 10...
A page labelled as number 11 will only appear from three to five pages after the first page labelled as number ten, and so on and so forth.

As a result, if a book has 300 pages, it will just say this book has 100 pages but in reality each page number that is displayed corresponds to about 3 real pages.

It is quite annoying as I never know where exactly I was when I want to go back to a certain page number and it makes it very hard to assess the real length of a book.

I guess many people will tell me that it might come from a corrupt epub file, but I can assure my epub files are clean, and that I have a big enough library (approx 150 books) to ensure that this issue is more a bug due to the KOBO GLO READER than the file format.

Does anybody faces the same problem and if yes, how can I fix this?

Thanks for the help of the community

[robko]

It not a bug. It is the nature of the way the Adobe epub software that is the base for most ereaders assigns page numbers. Since the amount of text displayed on a "physical screen" of the device depends on font size, an Adoble "epub page" is calculated as 1024 characters, so if you are using a larger font it will be multiple pages. Yes this is arbitrary (but consistent) but what would be a better way? You have to pick some number and if you change font size from the standard used you're right back where you started. If you want to use actually pages from the book what edition do you use (hardcover, softcover etc). And you still don't end up with one page per screen.
There is no way around this with epubs currently.

[magic.bretzel]

Thank you for your clear answer. I didn't know all of this.
You're right to say things would be messed up if you change the font size, then you'll lose the page number references ...


A good workaround would be :
to put an index after the page number as the ebook reader of calibre does: p.10 > p.10.5 > p.11 ...
Or to have two type of page numbering: the absolute and the relative (to the configuration)...

Still as far as I remember, FBREADER for android does this. the page number depends on the font size and the resolution of the screen. The page number depends on the device and its configuration...

Thanks