[Hitch]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A simple example of something I could get from an index, but not a search:

The author Charles Dickens lived in many different houses over the course of his life. In a good biography of Dickens, I can look up "house" or "home" in the index, and I'll get a list of all the houses that Dickens lived in, with text references for each one. There is no simple search I could do in the book which would get me such a list. As I said in my previous post, an index allows you to search on topics rather than on just words that appear in the text.

Yes, Harry:

I concur, completely. This is part of the conundrum, when I'm discussing this issue with a client or prospective client. This is why we started using the embedded ids, so as to create a linked index...but as I mentioned, it's cumbersome, at best, to use.

This is from the original post:

Quote:

I took that to be the reason.

Yes, but we all asked WHY, to tease out the actual usability issue. IOW, why do we WANT RPNs? (Real Page Numbers, I'm sick of typing it out.) What are the reasons?

1. An instructor in a course that will have people with both e- and print books, wants to be able to say "this week's coursework is from page X to Y."
2. We have an index, and want to be able to go directly to that page.
3. Now I'm out of reasons.

In the case of 1, you can do that with either a) the embedded id's linked to a back-of-book page map. Using the invisible (to the eye) id's, alone, doesn't QUITE get the less tech-savvy there, (and you can't really search for ids, using an on-device search), and that likely works best, and the least intrusively, for the user. Bear in mind, for this one, if you put images in, you can't search those. That makes those worse than useless, in my opinion. If you type page numbers in, and the book goes to (say) page 324, and you're searching for page 24, you'll get p. 24, 224, 324...and etc. This then combines the interrupted page appearance (which ALWAYS looks like you've made an error, to the buyer, and don't think that they won't hop, skip and jump to go tell Amazon about it!!!), and a form of search. So, this doesn't really emulate the user-friendliness of RPNs and thumbing, not really.

In the case of 2, we can all do what we've been doing--embed the page number as an id, and jump the user there, EXACTLY as they would have, using some page-flipping/thumbing, so that the person ends up at the top of the "page." Then, just like print, they are on their own to find the material "on the page" or screen(s). As I hope I explained, above, that has some real drawbacks.

I guess that 3 would be, "just because that's how it is in print, and I want it." I mean, to restate what I said, if you embed pngs, or jpegs, icons, whatever, you cannot search on those. That, to me, is pretty useless. No offense to the OP here. What's the point? What, the reader opens the file, and then click-click-clicks his way, to find page 158? Sweet moses on a pony. How user-friendly is that?

If there's some other aspect to having "real page numbers," I don't know what it is. I've now had 3 different folks, in the last few weeks, ask me to make FXL books for them, because they say that they HAVE TO HAVE RPNs. But the thing that gets me is, they can never really elucidate the WHY. As in, what functionality, from print, EXACTLY, is being replicated?

My issue isn't that we're unwilling to do what it takes, to make RPNs. My issue is the end-user experience. Amazon--and let's face it, ePUB or MOBI, those dudes are the 900lb. gorillia--is VERY attuned to this. You get 1, 2, or 5 complaints about usability, and they get VERY nasty, very quickly, with the publisher. That, then, is on the publisher.

About my selfish reasons:

Spoiler:

However--and this is where I'm going to be selfish--part of remaining on the Amazon list, as a professional conversion service, is that they fully expect that having passed all their tests, etc., you won't be stupid enough to create a book with a BAD reading experience, for the buyer. They take a very DIM VIEW of companies that produce books that engender complaints. We're the only company on that list in North America, or even on this side of the globe, and I want to bloody well stay on it. We worked VERY hard to be put on that list. It's not a damn directory listing.

I'd LOVE to come up with a better way. I would. But, unless I've missed a step, there's NO WAY to do that that then works on ALL the Amazon devices. So, do we build the page maps/pagelists, and wait for the devices to come TO it? Or...?

Oh, yes, of course--you can create FXL. But I still feel strongly that FXL is the WRONG solution for text-heavy pages. Lord, talk about a BAD reading experience! Hundreds of pages of pinch-zoom, pan/scan, etc.? NO THANKS.

Them thar are my thoughts, gang. Meera--I don't agree that a concordance is a reasonable substitution for a properly-curated index. I agree that it's better than NOTHING, of course, but...they're not the same.

Just my $.02,

Hitch