A way to find word length of chapters/stories in book?

[andy9279]

I am trying to find some way; an app, a Calibre plugin, or something else that will find the word length of each story/chapter inside of a book. I have the Calibre plugin that will show the total word length for a book, but I mostly read short stories and I have an (extremely long) list of these stories in a wordpad document I want to read. Before I dive in and read, I'd like to know the approximate word count -- but this is something I want to see on my laptop where I keep this list, so I can survey this (long) list quickly, rather than doing it on my kobo and find something I'm interested in that I have time for. Currently the way I do it is just copy the entire story from Calibre's epub reader and pasting it into libreoffice and seeing what the word count is and adding that to the end of the story title, like....

James, M.R. - The Ash Tree 5k

A bit time consuming, but I've yet to find another way.

Maybe there's not one, but I figured I'd ask.

[ownedbycats]

The only way I can think of is to use EpubSplit to break it up into chapters and then run each one through the Word Count plugin.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by andy9279

I am trying to find some way; an app, a Calibre plugin, or something else that will find the word length of each story/chapter inside of a book. I have the Calibre plugin that will show the total word length for a book, but I mostly read short stories and I have an (extremely long) list of these stories in a wordpad document I want to read. Before I dive in and read, I'd like to know the approximate word count -- but this is something I want to see on my laptop where I keep this list, so I can survey this (long) list quickly, rather than doing it on my kobo and find something I'm interested in that I have time for. Currently the way I do it is just copy the entire story from Calibre's epub reader and pasting it into libreoffice and seeing what the word count is and adding that to the end of the story title, like....

James, M.R. - The Ash Tree 5k

A bit time consuming, but I've yet to find another way.

Maybe there's not one, but I figured I'd ask.

If each story is in a separate XHTML file in an EPUB, then Sigil Reports should do the trick:



BR

[kevin3289]

Open Office portable has a word count function in the text file section. Just copy the words you want to count and paste them into the Open Office pane.
You should be able to get the program from Portable apps.
You can copy the words from the file preview pane in Calibre.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

If each story is in a separate XHTML file in an EPUB, then Sigil Reports should do the trick

Yep. That's my absolute favorite way to get quick word counts of everything in the book.

Originally Posted by kevin3289

Open Office portable has a word count function in the text file section. Just copy the words you want to count and paste them into the Open Office pane.

LibreOffice 7.0 (August 2020) introduced an easy chapter word count right into the Navigator.

See my comment in:

• /r/LibreOffice: "Chapter Word Count?"

for how to use it.

- - -

Side Note: Do not use OpenOffice—it has been abandoned for 12 years. See the post I wrote just a few days ago for more details.

LibreOffice is OpenOffice+12 years of constant updates:

• Every 6 months comes a major version with new functionality + performance improvements.
• Every month comes a minor version with a ton of bugfixes + compatibility updates.

In 12 years, OpenOffice "fixed" ~12 bugs.

In that same time period, LibreOffice has continuously gotten better + fixed tens of thousands of issues.

- - -

Originally Posted by kevin3289

You can copy the words from the file preview pane in Calibre.

I tend to do a Calibre EPUB (or whatever ebook format) -> DOCX conversion.

Doing it this way would carry over the book's chapters/headings.

Then you can just use the LO Navigator tip I taught above to get an instant word count for a given chapter.

[andy9279]

Thanks for the help and ideas everybody, I will try some of these. I do have Sigil, and that seems to work pretty well, at first it was a little challenging figuring out what XHTML corresponded to what story since they're usually just named 001, 002, etc. -- but then I discovered I can double click on a file and it shows up in the preview pane (lol I have way more experience editing books with Calibre than Sigil).

Thanks again.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by andy9279

Thanks for the help and ideas everybody, [...]

You're welcome.

Originally Posted by andy9279

Sigil, [...], at first it was a little challenging figuring out what XHTML corresponded to what story since they're usually just named 001, 002, etc.

One trick I do right in the beginning is create human-readable filenames:

Before:

• index_split_001.xhtml
• index_split_002.xhtml
• index_split_003.xhtml
• index_split_004.xhtml
• [...]

After:

• titlepage.xhtml
• copyright.xhtml
• Introduction.xhtml
• Chapter01.xhtml
• Chapter02.xhtml
• [...]

How to Mass Rename Files?

In Sigil, you can easily do this by:

1) Go to the Book Browser along the left side.

2) Shift+Left-Click to highlight which files you want to change.

3) Right-Click > Rename.



4) In the "Rename files Starting at:" box, type in:

• Chapter01.xhtml

5) Press OK.

Sigil will auto-rename the highlighted files from:

• Chapter01.xhtml
• [...]
• Chapter99.xhtml

Now when you run the Reports, it'll be so much easier to understand:

Originally Posted by andy9279

but then I discovered I can double click on a file and it shows up in the preview pane (lol I have way more experience editing books with Calibre than Sigil).

Thanks again.

There's a lot more tricks with Reports you can do too.

I wrote about many just a few months ago:

• 2022: "Pratchett and Chapters?"

and in Post #14, I linked to a lot more!

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

The Reports are AMAZING. Definitely take lots of advantage of those.

You can also use them to list all links in a book, making it very easy to:

• Spot broken footnotes
• Visit every single URL and let you know it's alive
• Or lots of other tricks.

Human-readable filenames also make understanding links in footnotes/TOCs/Indexes way easier too.

Much easier to know where this link points:

• <a href="../Text/Chapter001.xhtml#footnote1>

compared to:

• <a href="../Text/index_split_006.xhtml#footnote1>

A few more renaming tricks are listed in my posts here:

• 2021: "Indexing in SIGIL - How to add "See also...""