Quote:
Originally Posted by route66
Great that it's in the manual but why should such a basic feature require menu tapping, I consider the lack of page display on the page itself a unecessary flaw for something that can be easily remedied.
|
I strongly suspect that Amazon wants to get people accustomed to thinking more in terms of locations. Page numbers are an anachronism when it comes to ebooks. There is no "page", so the number is meaningless. Mapping it to a particular edition of an ebook is good for referencing an area in the book for those who don't have the ebook and for academic use, but otherwise what's the difference? You're at location 4500 out of 6900, or about 65% of the way through the book. How much reading is that? Well, that's what takes getting used to. You learned over many years to associate 150 pages with a particular amount of reading, but even those who very much want page numbers would recognize that 150 pages of dense print isn't the same thing as 150 pages of large print, wide margin, illustrated kids book.
If paper books had, instead, used locations, and that's what you'd learned your entire life you'd be screaming if the Kindle used something as "stupid" as screens, which obviously mean nothing if you change the font/margin/etc... Imagine if paper books had a little number in the margin ever 5 lines or so telling how many "words" into the book you were [defined as the old typing speed calculations were, 5 letters to a word]... it wouldn't matter if you were reading the large print version, the hardback, or the paperback, you could tell somebody: "in the paragraph containing word 65274..." and after a while even page numbers would sound stupid... that's what location numbers are, though Amazon's definition of a location is a bit more opaque than "words", it is in 128 byte chunks, IIRC, which roughly maps to 128 letters, or about 25 words by my above "typing speed" definition.
edit: those who grew up in church might recognize something like locations already...
Quote:
|
Let's turn to the book of Psalms, chapter 137, verse 9...
|