Quote:
Originally Posted by Zeebra
Ha! I didn't say they needed to remove it, just that they don't have to re-calculate which book is the longest each time a new book is added. An upper limit on dots for very long books is fine. Anything over a certain number of pages has the same number of dots.
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Recalculating which book is the longest is probably best implemented as an insertion sort: O(n) where n is probably on the order of only a thousand. The Kindle could do it in a millisecond, easily, and would only have to do it when a new book was added.
Amazon will have realised the same thing.
The only reason really long books top out at a max number of dots is because book sizes have a long-tail distribution: most books are not enormously long, and it is more important to show your position in the majority of shorter books than it is to show it in the few enormously long ones.
The classic way to handle long-tail distributions is to use a logarithmic scale, but honestly this feature is exposed to users and a log scale would probably be deeply confusing to a lot of them, not least because no scale is *visible*, it's just a string of dots, so even people who knew what a log scale was would see instead a bunch of dots where adjacent books of different lengths where you were at the same place in each had the bold 'read' dots going different distances on the screen, a longer distance for shorter books. Way too confusing. Capping the display is the only sane approach.