The 2014 Annual Reading Challenge Discussion Thread!

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by CRussel

OK, so what to do with today's read -- an 18 page short story.

If it'd be a 1500 page book, would you split it up?

I added 'Bilbo's last song' as a book read to my list the other day

[CRussel]

Finished four more books in the last few days, including one audio book this morning. I'm likely behind schedule right now, but don't really care. I'll pick it up when I get a bit of slack time at work.

[Waylander]

Where do I get the greasemonkey thing for the Goodreads reading challenge sidebar? It looks really good.

[jbcohen]

I have decided this year to start counting things by the page and so far I am up to 2,700. On schedule for this point in January. My goal is 27K.

[pdurrant]

I've been having fun reading books from my TBR pile, both the newest and the oldest.

But I'm not doing too well on my target of keeping my spending below $40 per month. I haven't even made it through January. Perhaps I can be extra-frugal in February.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

I just discovered something:



Funny. I didn't actually know of this clip before I wrote that post...

[orlok]

Well I'm already 3 books behind my 75 book challenge... The first I read (1632 by Eric Flint) was about 600 pages, and over the last couple of weeks I have only managed half an hour or less a day to read, due to other commitments. Aaarrrggg!

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

But I'm not doing too well on my target of keeping my spending below $40 per month. I haven't even made it through January. Perhaps I can be extra-frugal in February.

Of course you can. After all, it's the shortest month of the year!

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by orlok

Well I'm already 3 books behind my 75 book challenge... The first I read (1632 by Eric Flint) was about 600 pages, and over the last couple of weeks I have only managed half an hour or less a day to read, due to other commitments. Aaarrrggg!

That's why I decided to use page count as a goal. A book can be 200 pages, but it can also be 600 or 1200. Setting a number of books as a goal invites to read shorter books to meet the goal more easily. Page count does not have that problem.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by orlok

Well I'm already 3 books behind my 75 book challenge... The first I read (1632 by Eric Flint) was about 600 pages, and over the last couple of weeks I have only managed half an hour or less a day to read, due to other commitments. Aaarrrggg!

Read shorter books.

I purposely chose shorter books when I could this year for my challenge because I knew it would be crazy enough. I could probably never read seventy 600 page books in a year as my best year for pages is around 25,000 pages.

Pages are deceptive as well. I've had 200 page books take longer than 400 page books. It depends on font size, spacing, and actual difficulty of the text. I have a 440 page book I've probably spent ten hours reading to only get halfway through it so far. While I've got another 400 page book that only took ten hours to read the whole thing.

Every method of counting is flawed in some way, read to have fun and my usual goal is just to record what I read.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

Pages are deceptive as well. I've had 200 page books take longer than 400 page books. It depends on font size, spacing, and actual difficulty of the text.

Difficulty, true enough, but if you use Calibre and Count Pages, you can set the plugin to count characters, so font sizes and spacing don't have any effect anymore. I've found 2400 characters to be a good match to create "paperback sized" e-books. (Del Rey and Ballantine average about 2400 characters a page in the paperbacks I have from them, as does Wizards of the Coast.)

If the paperback has a large whitespace when starting a new chapter, or many illustrations, it could be a bit "thicker" than the e-book, because Count Pages by character obviously ignores whitespace and illustrations.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

Pages are deceptive as well. I've had 200 page books take longer than 400 page books. It depends on font size, spacing, and actual difficulty of the text.

And even though e-reading can alleviate a lot of that, publishers still try to get cute and shrink text. Three of my most recent books all had the same double-whammy, in which the body set a base font size of 90% and the paragraphs were set to "small" (instead of the normal "medium")...resulting in Teeny Tiny Text. Granted, I understand that on copyright pages, but that's not how normal pages should work!

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

Every method of counting is flawed in some way, read to have fun and my usual goal is just to record what I read.

I'll second that, for sure. A lot of my books come out to about 350 pages in print or about 270 by Adobe's calculations; I use the printed count just because that's what I'm accustomed to. Even then, there's the question of which edition to use; I've seen books that I bought years ago at under 200 pages suddenly bloat up to over 300 with a new printing. (I think it's related to perceived value; people don't want to pay as much for a skinny book, so the publisher bumps the formatting to bulk up the page count.)

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

And even though e-reading can alleviate a lot of that, publishers still try to get cute and shrink text. Three of my most recent books all had the same double-whammy, in which the body set a base font size of 90% and the paragraphs were set to "small" (instead of the normal "medium")...resulting in Teeny Tiny Text. Granted, I understand that on copyright pages, but that's not how normal pages should work!

I never understood that. Why not use 100% for normal text, 120% or so for chapters, and 90% or 80% for non-running text such as the copyright pages? (And even there, it's not necessary.)

Some years ago, it also was very "stylish" to have websites with tiny text. Think fonts at 8 or even 7pt. Try to read that, on a 22 inch 1920x1080 screen. (Not to mention Full HD notebook screens...)

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

Every method of counting is flawed in some way, read to have fun and my usual goal is just to record what I read.

Agreed! Pick a system that works for you and that doesn't drive your reading selections. Your tracking system should be to supplement and enhance your reading, not direct your reading.* One of the reasons I went with pages when I started is because I have a fairly good feel for how it takes me to read my usual books with a given page count. Others don't care and just count number of books. If I had to start over now, I might choose a different metric.

*Unless you are trying to force yourself to read in a different way in which case it might be helpful.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I never understood that. Why not use 100% for normal text, 120% or so for chapters, and 90% or 80% for non-running text such as the copyright pages? (And even there, it's not necessary.)

Some years ago, it also was very "stylish" to have websites with tiny text. Think fonts at 8 or even 7pt. Try to read that, on a 22 inch 1920x1080 screen. (Not to mention Full HD notebook screens...)

I'm a webmaster by trade, and a minimalist by nature. I'm a firm believer in putting the controls in the hands of the users, so they can set their browser preferences once and never have to worry about it again. In my opinion, a book's standard code - aside from the stylesheet - should rarely be more complicated than headers, paragraphs, line breaks, bold, italics, and the occasional section divider. Sure, sometimes you do need more, like blockquotes or a way to represent things like text messages, but when I edited an ezine, it was really rare for my writers to need more than that.

Unfortunately, a lot of ebooks these days are styled to within an inch of their lives. I've seen some where the stylesheet is over 120K, and on top of that the span elements are nested three and four layers deep. Instead of setting the usual font at the body level, they define it as a class on every paragraph - and worse, sometimes they define one font there, only to immediately change it with a span element that encompasses the whole paragraph's text! Then there are the margins specified in inches...

Oh, I understand how it happens; lack of care in setting up a word processor template, combined with sloppy manual styling and then exported to HTML, will give shoddy results every time. I just think the publisher should take more pride in the finished product...or at least hire a polisher who takes pride in his work.