Quote:
Originally Posted by detayls
Five years ago Amazon added an optional feature that allows their readers to see a "real" page number. I wonder why nobody mentioned this. My original post was created in the hope of discovering why this feature is not used much.
|
eschwartz mentioned it in Post #45 of the topic:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...79#post3288079
In order to create those physical "page numbers", you must create a PageList or page-map file.
Hitch covered why these types of files are a pain to create (and doesn't "only take an hour") in Post #6:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...83#post3287483
Then there is the whole argument that page numbers in digital texts are hogwash (which is my view).
Semi-related is Indexes in ebooks as well (they typically have hundreds/thousands of "page numbers", and also require quite a lot of work to properly link).
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
As always, you say it much better than I ever could (well, that is why you do this professionally...)
|
Let us just say I have a lot of time to ponder about it. :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
I just stick with "meh, relics of a legacy format" and refuse to even think about indexes.  |
Page Numbers in digital books... those can just go the way of the dodo!!! :P
More Index Ranting Below:
Indexes... I personally am not a fan of them in digital books, although I have changed from my "strong disagreement" to just a "grumbling neutral" (thanks to Hitch). :P
I sometimes send some "Latest Research Summaries" over in Hitch's direction every so often. I have a few strongly worded emails about Indexes sent over the past few months (maybe past year?). I could probably go sorting through them and posting them on the forums if anyone wants another egg of Index knowledge. :P
From what I could tell, most of the Indexes created though are "dumb indexes" for print books (and creating one of these can take QUITE a bit of time). The GIANT disadvantage of this type though (and one that I see is the biggest) is that the book/text CAN NOT change after the Index is made.
If you change the margins, the Index is wrong. If you change the font, Index wrong. If you change page size, Index wrong. If you added in a new paragraph on page 123, Index wrong (well, depends on how badly the rest of the chapter reflows). Removed or added a footnote? Index could be wrong.
This is why Indexing is done as one of the very last possible steps in bookmaking. The publisher/typographer finishes all of the typesetting, then the final document gets sent out, the book gets Indexed, they append the Index on the end, and then the book won't be touched. Only the most minor of errors
might be fixed afterwards.
I believe this is also one of the reasons why they have the Roman Numeral page numbers for Front Matter (so it doesn't mess with the Index page numbering AT ALL). Then a new Preface/Foreword/copyright page could get slapped on, reprint it, and call it done.
I find a much more worthy goal is having a "proper index" with correctly marked source documents though. This would cover you in case of major changes or the book being reformatted/reflowed in the future. But as I said in the previous post... this "proper index" takes exponentially longer to create.
The "dumb index" and the "proper index" may look the same on the surface, but the proper one becomes instantly more advantageous the more versions/formats of the book you have.
Side Note: For those of you who don't know, a Concordance is like an Index, but it would list every occurrence of the words (for the most part):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance_(publishing)
A Concordance is similar to what you get if you did a Search through an ebook.
For example, this is what Sigil's Index -> Create Index tool would create. Or Word's Auto-Indexing tool (you feed it a list of words, and it will create an Index with every instance of those words).
Then you have to go in and manually sort through all that crap. (I still don't know which would be easier, trimming down all the absolute crap or just generating an Index semi-automatically and adding in each one on a case-by-case basis... maybe a mix of both).
The superiority of the Index is the human curation.
They can tackle more specific topics that you can't get through a simple search. For example:
"Ricardo, David -> law of association, 158–163, 168, 174"
If you did a search for "Ricardo", you may get a ton of different hits (43 hits in this book), or if you did a search for "law of association" you may get a whole other host of hits (10 hits). But if you wanted to know about David Ricardo's law of association... that is a different beast.
Or an Index can cover much broader topics such as "Ancestry" (which would cover "ancestor" + all related terms/words).
An Indexer also makes sure that all the irrelevant mentions are not needed. (Aristotle might be mentioned 10 times in the book, but in only 2 cases is he actually relevant to the text).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I'm with Cins and eschwartz on this. You said and explained it better than I. Of course, I seem to recall that you're neck-deep in indexing woes, as we speak, are you not?
|
Heh, yep. I spent about a month and a half to get to ~4600/5100 complete... and I already handled all the easy ones, so these last 500 are getting harder and harder. 50 are pages that I read and I couldn't find the given entry, 98 are page ranges. The rest I probably haven't gotten around to yet, or just skimmed over.
Later on in the project, I personally found it was much easier to tackle the Index markup on a per page basis (tackle all of the entries on Page 129, then Page 130, then Page 131, [...]) instead of trying to tackle all from a single entry (all of Ricardo, all of Keynes, all of Aristotle, [...]).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
You have my sympathies. I hope you get paid for those damn hours! (Trust me: I think I've had a handful of clients over the years that were willing to pay for the changeover from the static index to the HTML version.)
|
I had a whole section dedicated here, but my Notepad++ messed up and I lost everything below this point, and I don't feel like retyping it.
I did submit the WIP Draft PDFs though, and they were blown away by the high quality.
I want to push myself further though... I still have a heck of a lot more typography (and Indexing) to learn. Hopefully they accept my finished version/s of the book.
