Quote:
Originally Posted by Geralt
Possibly. I read mostly fantasy with occasional sci-fi and most of my ebooks are from Gollancz/Orion Publishing, HarperCollins/Harpervoyager or Random House.
Pretty straightforward really.
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I'm still not convinced "straightforward" is a good word to use here, as it's not nearly as straightforward for all books.
Especially when there are recent books with huge discrepancies in page counts - take The Luminaries (I picked a recent, bigger book as an example as the discrepancies are most obvious with those) on Goodreads: hardback & paperback are 832-848 pages, depending on edition; Kindle editions are 832-849 pages; the first / more popular ePub edition is
788 pages (which doesn't seem to correspond to any paper edition whatsoever - I have no idea at all where it comes from, as ADE gives 753 as the page count for my edition, so it's probably not even that), another is 832 pages.
The main ePub edition (published by Hachette / Little, Brown and Company) is clearly the odd one out, and would mean a difference of 50 pages already just from one book.
There are quite a few others like that as well; more often than not, in such cases, the Kindle edition page counts do bear a relatively close relation to the paper versions, but the ebook / epub version page counts can be very off.
Yes, it's easy enough to check (and compare against other / paper versions) and if you spot something's off, to fix it or let librarians know, but I doubt everyone would go to that much effort, especially people who read 100-300 books a year. Much easier to just add the first edition that looks about right as far as format, cover and description go.
Anyway, I'm not saying it's impossible - obviously not! - but the way Goodreads catalogue works, I'm just saying that doing page-based challenges can just be, well, a bit challenging, as sometimes all the information isn't there at all and sometimes it's quite noticeably off compared to other editions, and not everyone might even have noticed that - I didn't, until just the other day, as it never really occurred to me to wonder before.