Paged number data in ebooks and which ereaders support them.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

My wife was in a book club. When they talk about things that happened in the book. they refer to page numbers. Clearly that's not the way to go.

What do they do if they read an older book like The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby where there are many, many editions?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

What do they do if they read an older book like The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby where there are many, many editions?

Oddly a book club my spouse joined for a short while insisted that the members be reading the same edition. Basically, they were supposed to go out and buy the book to read it. My spouse dropped out since reading on her Kobo and giving chapter references was not good enough.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Oddly a book club my spouse joined for a short while insisted that the members be reading the same edition. Basically, they were supposed to go out and buy the book to read it. My spouse dropped out since reading on her Kobo and giving chapter references was not good enough.

I would wonder if that book club was sponsored by a specific publisher.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Oddly a book club my spouse joined for a short while insisted that the members be reading the same edition. Basically, they were supposed to go out and buy the book to read it. My spouse dropped out since reading on her Kobo and giving chapter references was not good enough.

All Kindle book club. They can go off the Kindle Loc number. Boom. Problem solved! (And long term, cheaper than the buy each book club.)

[haertig]

It would be nice if you could set an "A" point (the first word of the first chapter) and a "B" point (the last word of the last chapter) and the eReader could dynamically calculate your position in the book as a percentage. With enough decimal points to give precision down to, say, a 200 word section of the book.

It seems like this would work fairly well across editions and different font size and margin settings settings. The printed book people would not fit in however. But they have no standards anyway, so they don't even fit in with each other.

A percentage number, with adequate precision, might even kind of work a little to go from an eBook to an audiobook. Counting words/percentages in an eBook is not going to directly match to counting bytes/percentages in an audio file, but things might average out better than one would think. Enough to be useful to some degree at least.

[John F]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

All Kindle book club. They can go off the Kindle Loc number. Boom. Problem solved! (And long term, cheaper than the buy each book club.)

Wouldn't that depend on the Kindle ebook? There may be a lot of different public domain "kindle books" out there, and they may have different loc numbers?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

I know at one point, Amazon added support for page number data to the Kindle, so that people in book clubs that were reading along with people that had physical copies knew what page number they were on.

Are there other ereaders that support this? Is there a way to add page number data to ePubs?

I'm sorry, but Kindle page numbers are not bookclub friendly.

Let say you have the Kindle version. I have an ePub. Someone else has a paperback. All three page numbers are not going to be the same.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Epubs usually support Adobe page numbers. But those are different from paper copy numbers.

And of course different paper editions have different page numbers. A hardcover and a mass market paperback always have pretty wildly different page count.

And if the ePub is read on with a program that does 1 screen = 1 page, then the page numbers are going to also be wildly out of whack from the other page numbers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

A book study I'm aware of was giving out page numbers; I suggested that maybe chapter numbers might be more appropriate only to learn that the author did NOT number the chapters, and in fact they appear in the TOC as the name of the main character in the chapter; ie: Jess, Theo, Warfield's Jarret and of course there are multiple chapters with the same title.

I've seen that before and that is a real hassle trying to find where you are in two different pBook version with different page numbers.

At least with a Reader, I can search to find where I should be.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Yes, and some books don't have chapters even by name only.
There is a way of doing the page numbers of the paper edition in an ebook that work for most formats, any device and and any app. Though it can be annoying if you don't want page numbers visible in the text, however it can still work even if the page number text is invisible.

Discworld. No chapters.

[JSWolf]

delete post

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by John F

Wouldn't that depend on the Kindle ebook? There may be a lot of different public domain "kindle books" out there, and they may have different loc numbers?

Yes, but I was going on top of the 'everyone is supposed to have the same edition' message. The upside to doing that on a Kindle is many of those public domain books are free.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by haertig

It would be nice if you could set an "A" point (the first word of the first chapter) and a "B" point (the last word of the last chapter) and the eReader could dynamically calculate your position in the book as a percentage. With enough decimal points to give precision down to, say, a 200 word section of the book.

Isn't that loosely how Adobe ePub pages are calculated?

[haertig]

About the only location scheme I can think of that works across everything ... is the Book-Chapter-Verse structure of the Bible. And that only works because those markers are "hard coded" into the text. It works well in the Bible, but would suck in novels. Technical textbooks often have something similar with Chapter-Section-Paragraph markers. But again, those are hard coded into the text. And usually indexed as well.

Book clubs have never been able to solve the problem, even back when there was no such thing as an eBook. You had different editions, different publishers, large print versions, etc. eBooks did not add a solution, they just expanded the problem.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by haertig

About the only location scheme I can think of that works across everything ... is the Book-Chapter-Verse structure of the Bible. And that only works because those markers are "hard coded" into the text. It works well in the Bible, but would suck in novels. Technical textbooks often have something similar with Chapter-Section-Paragraph markers. But again, those are hard coded into the text. And usually indexed as well.

Book clubs have never been able to solve the problem, even back when there was no such thing as an eBook. You had different editions, different publishers, large print versions, etc. eBooks did not add a solution, they just expanded the problem.

eBooks do provide a solution. All we need is some words to search and we can find the correct place easily.