epub page count determination

[sassanik]

Okay this is random question. I am prepping up to upload to ibookstore and they want page counts.

Now I have my word count numbers saved, but not my page count. I checked online and it appears the "traditional" word count to page count conversion for paperbacks is roughly 250 words/ 1 page

Calibre generates its page counts based on character counts, not word count.

I can of course grab a page count from word, but since I already have data in a spreadsheet I was thinking a word count/page count conversion would make more sense.

Is there a standard other than the roughly 250 words/ 1 page that I might use?


Amy

[pholy]

Well, there's the ADE device page count - that tiny number in the right margin on Sony, Nook, and Kobo readers. I don't remember the calculation, but if you have one of those devices it's easy to find out.

Of course, the iBook app may use a different calculation, and you'd have to have an iDevice and see if even shows page numbers anywhere, and check if the numbers change when the font size changes.

If a books hasn't been published in paper, it hasn't ever really had any pages to count, has it?

Sorry, I know we can't fight Apple, but it just seems weird to want page counts for an e(or i)book.

Probably dividing your word count by 250 will keep them happy, as long as you don't tell them what you did. If they want a particular algorithm to be used, they need to say what it is, after all.

[sassanik]

Yeah I have no idea why the ibookstore wants a page count, a word count I could understand, but a page count?!

Every student can tell you how easy it is to manipulate a page count to make a paper longer.

I am still having issues getting set up with the ibookstore, so far they have been the biggest pain. It would not be hard if I had a Mac, but I do not.

Anyway I went with the 250 words theory, its no more arbitrary than anything else I could come up with. I could check everyone to see what the epub page count but we are talking 350+ ebooks.

Currently I am trying to get ibookstore distribution setup through ARe, I am crossing my fingers that it actually works.

Amy

[banjobama]

Epub files separate the "pages" by some amount of data. So if you can find out what that amount is, I bet you could do the math pretty easily and get the page count as it would show up on the device. When I make epubs using the Writer2epub OpenOffice extension, there's an option to set when to split the files. Too bad I have no idea what arbitrary number is used to separate the pages.

[user_none]

Calibre's ebook viewer uses the same formula as ADE. I can't remember the exact formula off the top of my head.

Unless Apple specifies a formula you are probably fine using the conversation for paper books.

[HarryT]

An ADE page is a count of 1024 characters in the compressed file.

[sassanik]

Now the character count would be useful, except that I don't have it for each file. I have the word counts saved, so unless I want to open each file and get character count, or page count at that point, its not terribly helpful for me. If I only had a couple of ebooks this would be fine, but with over 300 it could take a very long while.

I am still hitting my head trying to get this stupid Apple stuff uploaded correctly. I have to say I thought Overdrive was a nightmare to get setup with, but Apple is turning out to be twice as bad.

Currently got a hold of a Mac to use for the direct upload to the iBookstore which is proving to be no easier than any other route I have tried so far!

Yes there is a reason there are no ebooks in the ibookstore, its a royal PITA to work with!

Amy

[VydorScope]

This is why I use Smashwords... they handle all this junk with Apple for me.

[William F]

Vydor is correct.
Although I know of a book which showed up on the Apple store with the listing all in spanish.

[James_Wilde]

I don't know where the figure of 250 wpp came from, but it may be appropriate for ebooks, given the quality of today's screens. The only other figure I can come up with is 400 wpp for paper books, both hardcover and paperbacks. It's my experience that the paperback version of a book nowadays is a scaled down version of the hardcover, this based on actually counting the words on a page of a fairly wide variety of books, all fiction.

I should add that this may be a local value, since I think all the books I tested were Swedish.

Another thought - if a book is only available as a paperback, that figure of 250 could be right, since that would give a slightly more readable book than a scaled-down version of the hardcover. Although a loss of over a third of the number of words per page is very high for readability, especially the economic way publishers think these days.

[wannabee]

deleted . . .
didn't notice how old the thread was

[CrossReach]

I know I'm a bit late here, but I have a question about characters. In Word it gives characters with and without space. Which should I use when calculating by 1024? With or without spaces?

[gmw]

If the idea of counting characters was correct then I believe you should count the spaces. However, even though various places on the 'net do talk about counting "1024 characters" and even explicitly "1024 Unicode characters", I suspect that that is not the algorithm used by ADE (if that is what you're interested in matching).

Adobe aren't advertising, but Safari Books Online is one of several references I've found that say:

When there is no explicit page-map ADE calculates a page as being 1024 bytes of the compressed resource stream.

This would seem to make very good sense because it allows ADE to calculate page counts directly off the index, without decompressing every resource to count characters (typically each chapter is stored as a separate resource).

Curiously the MobileRead Wiki says both "1024 Unicode characters" (under the Page-Map heading) and 1024 compressed bytes (under the Page Numbers heading).

The 1024 bytes of compressed stream seems to match with the few epubs I've checked, but I can't say that I've been comprehensive in my testing.

ETA: For example I have a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. It has 132753 Unicode characters counting spaces (would be 130 pages); it has 106731 Unicode characters not counting spaces (would be 105 pages); it's compressed streams are 413bytes, 849bytes and 154625bytes (would be 51 pages). My Sony reader, and my Kobo Aura One say 51 pages. Calibre viewer says 138 pages. So go with what you like best.

[crich70]

I would think that # of pages would be arbitrary as it would in part depend on the font size of the text. I mean at size 12 font you will have fewer pages than if the font is set at a size of 16 right? Certainly the # of pages reflows depending on if you make the text larger or smaller (at least on my Kindle readers).

[gmw]

epub supports a pageList definition to allow publishers to describe page references explicitly (see that Safari Books Online link in my prior post), but no one uses it (that I know of, or if they do use it, no reader implements it).

ADE implements support for a page-map definition for the same purpose, but I've never come across a book that uses it. Without that page-map definition ADE will revert to an algorithm (as described in my previous post) that gives a fixed page count regardless of font and screen sizes. Obviously it will be rare that these arbitrary "page" references match what is actually displayed on the screen, but it is close enough (typically the same page number might display for a few screen refreshes), and consistent enough, to be useful.