Quote:
Originally Posted by guma
You are assuming here that publishers expect e-readers to behave like the KOBO does. I'm not sure whether this is a valid assumption, since most e-reading devices and apps seems to behave differently. I would guess that publishers just handle the toc data like a table of contents in a printed book.
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The behaviour is seen in ADE and in Adobe Reader Mobile based code. This covers a fair chunk of the ereaders out there. You can modify the ARM SDK to change this behaviour though in most cases I've seen, this has not been done. The only ebook publisher for which I have information on their ebook creation flow, used Adobe InDesign to create the ebooks from the author's submitted files and tested them with ADE after creation. I'm not absolutely certain since I wasn't that interested in their Kindle publishing but I think they used KindleGen to convert the epub for Amazon.
I've never seen a TOC in a real book that included the cover and title page while that is quite common in ebooks. Tables of content in paperback fiction books seem to be a vanishing breed in any event.
Looking at one paperback I have on the table (Dog and Dragon), the pages are:
There is no table of contents.
0. cover with EAN bar code on inside of cover
1. a blurb for the book
2. a list of books by the author
3. the title page
4. copyright and publisher information
5. dedication
6. blank
7. acknowledgements
8. blank
9. 1st page of list of characters
10. 2nd page of list of characters
1. finally... Chapter 1 starting on page 1
389. moving on to chapter 27 which ends on page 389
390. blank
391-393. Appendix
395-406 Excerpt from Portal
00. inside of back cover with UPC bar code
outside of back cover with puffery and repeat of EAN barcode
Now I look at the ebook. Layout is virtually identical except the blurb moves after the title page. There is a table of contents listing cover, title page, booklist, copyright & publisher info, dedication, acknowledgements, chapters 1 - 27, appendix, Portal excerpt. Average non-image page takes 2-3 taps to display.
When I read the paperback, I skipped by most of the first pages stopping to read the dedication and then plowed into chapter 1.
When I read the ebook (since Baen is good enough to supply their ebooks without DRM), I modified the TOC to start with chapter 1 so I didn't have to tap 20 times to get to the body of the book.
Quote:
Originally Posted by guma
Or do you think publishers are putting all this stuff (and especially the advertising blurbs) in a book but don't want people to read it?
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They may want people to read those pages and most of the time they place entries for the advertising in the TOC to make it easier to find. Television advertisers may expect people to sit and watch commercials. I prefer to do neither.
Regards,
David