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Originally Posted by ratinox
The only other way I can think to do that is to hard paginate like with PDF. This is a good idea for reference materials. It's a terrible idea for fiction.
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Agreed, especially if this makes the text non-interactive since the level of rage not being able to highlight text would bring about here would make the page number issue here seem like nothing.
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What's amusing to me about this is that ADE pages are in fact based on screen size and point size. One ADE page is approximately 1K of text or about 1/4 of one 8.5x11" printed page with 10 point text or about one screen's worth of text on a 6" reader.
ADE pages cannot be any more precise because ADE pages and percentages are the same numbers. Don't confuse what the numbers are with how they are displayed. Percentages could easily be displayed with decimal parts. I don't know if this is a good idea or not.
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I'd think for the majority of books decimals in percentages would be silly, but I'm also of the mind that page numbers in ebooks is even sillier. And the cases where the level of specificity required by what we have with page numbers in specific editions of physical books is largely limited to academic circles. The number of people reading on multiple devices which don't sync is likely a statistical rounding error in terms of users. Though you wouldn't believe that from what some people say here. Though I will grant syncing could be improved, there's also the issue of wifi not being literally everywhere anyway so syncing is going to be plagued with issues for the foreseeable future.
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A good UI is self-consistent among other things. What you describe is a baked-in inconsistency in what the UI displays if you're using faux pages based on character counts. So this is an argument against faux pages in a general purpose device.
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Following your reasoning and tempering with the origin of ADE pages which appear to beloved around here I come to the conclusion that the only self-consistent way to numerically paginate an ebook on an ebook reading device is by page turns.[/QUOTE]
I wouldn't use character counts, though again I'm not sure what system I'd want it to use. Perhaps tie any ebook w/ a physical book to the physical books first release, not a word or character count but literally coded in to the epub "somehow" so that it starts a page at the word that would start a page in the physical book and ends it in a similar fashion. As to how to handle ebooks with no physical release maybe leave it up to the publisher. Since we don't actually need two different ebooks to have comparable pages to each other in terms of page length just to be consistent across devices. Which I imagine is what you're describing.
*Yes, I know you're not going to like this idea, again both of us I feel are of the same mind on page numbers and this is just a discussion on how a inherently flawed and pointless system can be best adjusted to be the least bad.