Sick of Amazon Kindle books without Page Numbers...

[detayls]

Originally Posted by issybird

I like page numbers.
.
.
Lack of page numbers doesn't keep me from reading a book, but I prefer the experience with page numbers.

This is my feeling exactly.

[detayls]

Five years ago Amazon added an optional feature that allows their readers to see a "real" page number. I wonder why nobody mentioned this. My original post was created in the hope of discovering why this feature is not used much.

Real page numbers

"The addition of real page numbers, however, is probably the most important, and most exciting, new feature in version 3.1. Up until now Kindle readers have suffered with “locations” in their e-books instead of pages. This makes sense, since e-books don’t actually have pages, but it can cause some trouble in a classroom setting or when you’re trying to figure out how much more you have to read in order to finish a book (“I’ll go to bed in a couple hundred more locations,” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue).

So, Amazon has now mapped page numbers from the physical edition of a book to its e-book counterpart, and that information now shows up on your Kindle. Amazon also lists the ISBN of of the edition used for the pagination information on the Kindle item’s product details for two reasons: first, to let people know the e-book has “real page” information and so that readers know which edition those page numbers come from."

[ApK]

Originally Posted by detayls

Five years ago Amazon added an optional feature that allows their readers to see a "real" page number. I wonder why nobody mentioned this. My original post was created in the hope of discovering why this feature is not used much.

Huh? You mentioned it in the OP. From the very first response on people have been telling you why it's not a huge deal for many.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by detayls

Five years ago Amazon added an optional feature that allows their readers to see a "real" page number. I wonder why nobody mentioned this. My original post was created in the hope of discovering why this feature is not used much.

eschwartz mentioned it in Post #45 of the topic:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...79#post3288079

In order to create those physical "page numbers", you must create a PageList or page-map file.

Hitch covered why these types of files are a pain to create (and doesn't "only take an hour") in Post #6:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...83#post3287483

Then there is the whole argument that page numbers in digital texts are hogwash (which is my view).

Semi-related is Indexes in ebooks as well (they typically have hundreds/thousands of "page numbers", and also require quite a lot of work to properly link).

Originally Posted by eschwartz

As always, you say it much better than I ever could (well, that is why you do this professionally...)

Let us just say I have a lot of time to ponder about it. :P

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I just stick with "meh, relics of a legacy format" and refuse to even think about indexes.

Page Numbers in digital books... those can just go the way of the dodo!!! :P

More Index Ranting Below:

Indexes... I personally am not a fan of them in digital books, although I have changed from my "strong disagreement" to just a "grumbling neutral" (thanks to Hitch). :P

I sometimes send some "Latest Research Summaries" over in Hitch's direction every so often. I have a few strongly worded emails about Indexes sent over the past few months (maybe past year?). I could probably go sorting through them and posting them on the forums if anyone wants another egg of Index knowledge. :P

From what I could tell, most of the Indexes created though are "dumb indexes" for print books (and creating one of these can take QUITE a bit of time). The GIANT disadvantage of this type though (and one that I see is the biggest) is that the book/text CAN NOT change after the Index is made.

If you change the margins, the Index is wrong. If you change the font, Index wrong. If you change page size, Index wrong. If you added in a new paragraph on page 123, Index wrong (well, depends on how badly the rest of the chapter reflows). Removed or added a footnote? Index could be wrong.

This is why Indexing is done as one of the very last possible steps in bookmaking. The publisher/typographer finishes all of the typesetting, then the final document gets sent out, the book gets Indexed, they append the Index on the end, and then the book won't be touched. Only the most minor of errors might be fixed afterwards.

I believe this is also one of the reasons why they have the Roman Numeral page numbers for Front Matter (so it doesn't mess with the Index page numbering AT ALL). Then a new Preface/Foreword/copyright page could get slapped on, reprint it, and call it done.

I find a much more worthy goal is having a "proper index" with correctly marked source documents though. This would cover you in case of major changes or the book being reformatted/reflowed in the future. But as I said in the previous post... this "proper index" takes exponentially longer to create.

The "dumb index" and the "proper index" may look the same on the surface, but the proper one becomes instantly more advantageous the more versions/formats of the book you have.

Side Note: For those of you who don't know, a Concordance is like an Index, but it would list every occurrence of the words (for the most part):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance_(publishing)

A Concordance is similar to what you get if you did a Search through an ebook.

For example, this is what Sigil's Index -> Create Index tool would create. Or Word's Auto-Indexing tool (you feed it a list of words, and it will create an Index with every instance of those words).

Then you have to go in and manually sort through all that crap. (I still don't know which would be easier, trimming down all the absolute crap or just generating an Index semi-automatically and adding in each one on a case-by-case basis... maybe a mix of both).

The superiority of the Index is the human curation.

They can tackle more specific topics that you can't get through a simple search. For example:

"Ricardo, David -> law of association, 158–163, 168, 174"

If you did a search for "Ricardo", you may get a ton of different hits (43 hits in this book), or if you did a search for "law of association" you may get a whole other host of hits (10 hits). But if you wanted to know about David Ricardo's law of association... that is a different beast.

Or an Index can cover much broader topics such as "Ancestry" (which would cover "ancestor" + all related terms/words).

An Indexer also makes sure that all the irrelevant mentions are not needed. (Aristotle might be mentioned 10 times in the book, but in only 2 cases is he actually relevant to the text).

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm with Cins and eschwartz on this. You said and explained it better than I. Of course, I seem to recall that you're neck-deep in indexing woes, as we speak, are you not?

Heh, yep. I spent about a month and a half to get to ~4600/5100 complete... and I already handled all the easy ones, so these last 500 are getting harder and harder. 50 are pages that I read and I couldn't find the given entry, 98 are page ranges. The rest I probably haven't gotten around to yet, or just skimmed over.

Later on in the project, I personally found it was much easier to tackle the Index markup on a per page basis (tackle all of the entries on Page 129, then Page 130, then Page 131, [...]) instead of trying to tackle all from a single entry (all of Ricardo, all of Keynes, all of Aristotle, [...]).

Originally Posted by Hitch

You have my sympathies. I hope you get paid for those damn hours! (Trust me: I think I've had a handful of clients over the years that were willing to pay for the changeover from the static index to the HTML version.)

I had a whole section dedicated here, but my Notepad++ messed up and I lost everything below this point, and I don't feel like retyping it.

I did submit the WIP Draft PDFs though, and they were blown away by the high quality.

I want to push myself further though... I still have a heck of a lot more typography (and Indexing) to learn. Hopefully they accept my finished version/s of the book.

[sanjon]

Page numbers don't really make sense on eReaders because of different screen sizes. I'm more than happy to have a percentage instead. And of course you have chapters as well...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by detayls

Five years ago Amazon added an optional feature that allows their readers to see a "real" page number. I wonder why nobody mentioned this.

I'm somewhat baffled by your claim that "nobody mentioned it"? The entire lengthy discussion about referencing was about precisely this. It's been mentioned innumerable times in this thread!

[Angst]

I do find the "percent of book read so far" number in the bottom right very useful. Combined with the number of dots denoting length on the home page I can tell how big the book is, where I am currently reading in the book, and how long it will take me to finish the book. Basically the same information I derived from page numbers.

[shanghaichica]

I prefer the location and the percentage read. Probably I've just gotten used to them, as in the beginning there were no page numbers. The only time I've ever found page numbers useful is when I took a paper book into work (as we were not allowed kindles). I was reading the book on both my kindle and in the physical copy and so using page numbers was useful to keep my place between the two formats. However since owning a kindle from 2010 and even reading ebooks on my iPhone from 2009 onwards that is the only occasion on which I've found page numbers useful.

[detayls]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm somewhat baffled by your claim that "nobody mentioned it"? The entire lengthy discussion about referencing was about precisely this. It's been mentioned innumerable times in this thread!

I beg to differ. Almost the entire discussion was about how useless the concept of a page number is given the ability to change font and size.

Amazon's addition 5 years ago of the page numbers tied to a print version of the book invalidates this claim.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by detayls

I beg to differ. Almost the entire discussion was about how useless the concept of a page number is given the ability to change font and size.

Amazon's addition 5 years ago of the page numbers tied to a print version of the book invalidates this claim.

I think very few think page numbers should or do relate to page turns on an ereader. The divide comes between those who find them useful, however artificial a construct they be in this context, and those who don't.

I'm in the very useful camp, myself. ADE page numbers are consistent, let me switch among my devices, and also allow me to calculate an accurate percentage for amount read, one that eliminates the extraneous.

What I don't get is why those who find no utility in page numbers insist they're silly and useless for all.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by detayls

I beg to differ. Almost the entire discussion was about how useless the concept of a page number is given the ability to change font and size.

HarryT specifically called out the lengthy discussion regarding referencing... not the thread as a whole.

And the discussion about referencing most pointedly is and was about the theoretical and practical usage of Real Page Numbers... as a reference in a citation.

Amazon's addition 5 years ago of the page numbers tied to a print version of the book invalidates this claim.

And now you have made (or repeated) a claim, but you still haven't provided a reasoning for why that is so.

In fact, why do you believe the existence of Real Page Numbers is proof positive that it is useful?
Especially see the aforementioned discussion regarding, yep, once again, references.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by issybird

I think very few think page numbers should or do relate to page turns on an ereader. The divide comes between those who find them useful, however artificial a construct they be in this context, and those who don't.

I'm in the very useful camp, myself. ADE page numbers are consistent, let me switch among my devices, and also allow me to calculate an accurate percentage for amount read, one that eliminates the extraneous.

What I don't get is why those who find no utility in page numbers insist they're silly and useless for all.

I think they are objectively silly, because they aren't consistent. Not to paper equivalents and not to a fixed character length.

I am positive there must be books out there with a Page-map or PageList, although as I don't usually purchase EPUB to begin with I am not in a position to know.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I think they are objectively silly, because they aren't consistent. Not to paper equivalents and not to a fixed character length.

The ADE page numbers may not be consistent with any paper book but they are consistent across devices and I'm pretty sure that's what issybird meant. The text on page X on my 5" phone is the same as that on my 8" Tablet and both Kobos einks (6" & 6.8") no matter which font, font-size, line-spacing or page-margins I happen to be using on each. For epub readers who switch between devices often it makes life a heck of a lot easier as we have no universal Whispersync-like option.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

The ADE page numbers may not be consistent with any paper book but they are consistent across devices and I'm pretty sure that's what issybird meant. The text on page X on my 5" phone is the same as that on my 8" Tablet and both Kobos einks (6" & 6.8") no matter which font, font-size, line-spacing or page-margins I happen to be using on each. For epub readers who switch between devices often it makes life a heck of a lot easier as we have no universal Whispersync-like option.

That response completely ignores the second part of my post (and the last part of the bit you did quote, should have clued you in).

I will have you know that the reason my post had a second paragraph is because that paragraph was relevant. Relevant enough that the first paragraph is essentially meaningless without it.

Good job.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

That response completely ignores the second part of my post (and the last part of the bit you did quote, should have clued you in).

I will have you know that the reason my post had a second paragraph is because that paragraph was relevant. Relevant enough that the first paragraph is essentially meaningless without it.

Good job.

You said they are objectively silly. I'm just disagreeing with you. I find them essential for me because of their consistency. I have no personal interest in academic citing.

And I'm not sure what relevance epub page-map/pagelist would have to my reply because many epubs don't have them. Their absence doesn't stop the ADE auto-generated page numbers being present and consistent when all you're trying to do is easily switch between devices.