Quote:
Originally Posted by haydnfan
I never understood this point. Physical books have page counts completely dependent upon font size. Why should it be different for ebooks? Why is it is so important to have an absolute measure? As an example the current mass market paperback edition of Dune is 894 pages long. The hardback copy in my shelf is 507 pages long.
If it is to be able to estimate a time to read, well Kindle and Kobo provide that figure directly in hours based on the average reader.
I can't imagine anything as imprecise as epub pages and kindle's "real page numbers" which both advance non-linearly. Every 2-3 pages (depending upon font setting), sometimes immediately with a chapter break. With the Kobo, every time you turn the page, the page count increments. With Kindle, every time you turn the page, the location count increments (based on how much text was on the screen). Those are meaningful figures to me.
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The epub page number should change immediately on a chapter break if the ebook is using the chapter per file format. As for epub page numbers being imprecise? If you are using the display page numbers in the margin, it is reproducible and consistent between devices whether the page numbers come from page-map or Adobe's synthetic page number algorithm.
As for why the page numbers? In a couple of my daughter's classes at university, the professor allowed the students to use the ebook version of the textbook (epub and pdf). He gave page number references and expected his students to reference those page numbers in their work. The deadtree and pdf versions weren't an issue with most of the epubs using Adobe's page-map to give page numbers that matched the other versions. In a couple of cases, the epub did not use page-map and he gave dual page number references which worked since the synthetic page numbers were consistent regardless of whether it was my daughter reading at flyspeck 3 font sizes (on my Aura One, she triggered the dual column mode) or one of her classmates who has vision issues and read with 2-3 lines of text on the display.
For textbooks, what is the time to read? The whole term if I only read what is needed? A couple of hours if I read the whole book in one session?
Personally, a good percentage of my ebook collection is cookbooks and I look up specific recipes, often in multiple books. Time to read is a meaningless number. For many other books, I find the time to read numbers to be, at best, nothing but a source of humour. Any relationship between the time shown to finish a chapter and the actual time is coincidental. Looking at my reading stats since the last time I reset them, I see 148 books read in 392.2 hours or about 2.65 hours per book. If I am reading as I often do while watching CFL football or hockey on TV, I will read during commercial breaks. Unless I immediately sleep my ereader at the end of the commercial, the time spent watching the game will be included in my reading time again making the numbers less than accurate.