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I prefer a visible table of contents, and on those e-books I have scanned and created, I always have one. However, I prefer to simplify a little. Many novels have many chapters, often as many as 60, which makes for a very large contents page. I prefer a contents page to be a single screen, so in those cases I use a grid of numbers alone: 01 02 03 04 etc, rather than Chapter 1 Chapter 2 etc. I'm quite happy to do without chapter titles on the contents page, just numbers, but like the titles in their place at the beginning of a chapter.
You may have noticed that Terry Pratchett seldom used chapters at all, only in the (as far as I can tell) Moist von Lipwig stories. This can be a problem if you like to leap back and forth from chapter to chapter, or to skip ahead.
With short story collections, I prefer the title/author in the normal fashion down the page, even if it runs to more than one screen. A typical author's collection might have between 15 and 25 stories, which is about one screen.
I'm not fussed about keeping the same "look" as the printed work. It's a different medium, so a simpler more spartan approach suits me. Sometimes it is necessary to alter a printed book to adapt it into ebook. My own book "Fast Tracks", which is an Atlas of Australia's motor racing circuits since 1901, had more than 90 single-page maps accompanied by single-page articles, all in alphabetical order. In the pbook the contents page was in two columns of smallish type. For the ebook, I redesigned the Contents table by grouping letters of the alphabet, so I finished up with about 12 chapters. Each chapter head was something like this:
H, K and L
Hume Weir Vic— Kilmore Vic— Lake Perkolilli WA— Lakeside Qld— Leyburn Qld— Lobethal SA— Longford Tas— Lowood Qld
Otherwise I would have had to link all ninety-odd articles, plus the intro and acknowledgements, to a very large Contents table.
As you can see, different strokes...
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