Kindle Page Number Proposal

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Koko

It would be an advantage to be given number of words rather than print pages when purchasing an e-book.

I agree that a word count would come in very handy at purchase time.

[pidgeon92]

Originally Posted by RolandD

What, exactly, does the Loc # mean on the Kindle?

Have a look at this thread:

http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/T...Fx1D7SY3BVSESG

[RolandD]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

Have a look at this thread:

http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/T...Fx1D7SY3BVSESG

Yeah, thanks. I now have a headache and the understanding that no one else knows either.

[Koko]

Few know for sure what locations actually are, even the Amazon CS doesn’t know.

[DiapDealer]

What's to know? They allow you to pinpoint specific passages in kindle books and are accurate/valid across all Kindle devices and apps regardless of customized user settings.

1 location = 150 bytes of mobi-html source.

(total # of unpacked mobi-html bytes/150) + 1 = number of locations in the finished ebook

[pruss]

What I don't really understand is why all this isn't customizable. It would take a tiny amount of Kindle developer time to give the user the option to choose exactly what information they want--percentage, percentage up to three significant figures, byte count, screen count, paragraph count, progress bar, etc. Users have different tastes and needs. Why the same for all?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by pruss

What I don't really understand is why all this isn't customizable. It would take a tiny amount of Kindle developer time to give the user the option to choose exactly what information they want--percentage, percentage up to three significant figures, byte count, screen count, paragraph count, progress bar, etc. Users have different tastes and needs. Why the same for all?

People often make the mistake of thinking that adding user configurable-options is a very simple process and can be easily accomplished. It doesn't work like that. Especially on simple devices with limited resources. Choices add overhead... decisions that need to be made before graphics, text or menus can be rendered on the screen. Every decision (configurable setting) slows things down. Also, the more configurable software is, the buggier it tends to become. Things become bloated. Updates and bug-fixes start getting few and farther between. Cats and dogs living together—mass hysteria!

Yes, I exaggerate, but there really is no such thing as a simple user-configurable option. User Choices are the antithesis of stability... and always have to be balanced against each other.

Would you rather have a device that let you configure and customize everything everything under the sun, but was extremely flaky, buggy and locked up every-other moment... or a device that had fewer configurable settings, but had a rock-solid OS and an interface that never flakes out on you?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

User Choices

Yeah, but with more choices, people could have a bigger war around WHICH choice to use. Doesn't arguing page number vs. locations seem dull when you can argue a dozen different position indicators or more!?

I mean, book-clubbers already can't seem to let go of page numbers and say stuff like "Middle of chapter 2, the paragraph starting with..." which would accommodate any rendering and edition, so maybe 9 different page numbering options will drive them right over the edge.

Total melee!

[RolandD]

Originally Posted by ApK

I mean, book-clubbers already can't seem to let go of page numbers and say stuff like "Middle of chapter 2, the paragraph starting with..." which would accommodate any rendering and edition, so maybe 9 different page numbering options will drive them right over the edge.

Better yet, why don't they just number the paragraphs? To me, this would solve the problem in the simplest manner.

[pruss]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

People often make the mistake of thinking that adding user configurable-options is a very simple process and can be easily accomplished. It doesn't work like that. Especially on simple devices with limited resources. Choices add overhead... decisions that need to be made before graphics, text or menus can be rendered on the screen. Every decision (configurable setting) slows things down. Also, the more configurable software is, the buggier it tends to become. Things become bloated. Updates and bug-fixes start getting few and farther between. Cats and dogs living together—mass hysteria!

There are simple and there are complicated user configurable options. Selecting what to show at the bottom of a screen is a simple one. Something that involves rendering a single line of text per screen does not noticeably slow down any modern device, no matter how limited, assuming all the data is available in the code already, or can easily be made available.

Yes, I exaggerate, but there really is no such thing as a simple user-configurable option. User Choices are the antithesis of stability... and always have to be balanced against each other.

I agree that there are stability concerns whenever you make things more complex, but the amount of complexity we're talking about here is very small. Major mobile open source projects like Plucker and AstroInfo for PalmOS and APV PDF Viewer for Android that I've worked on are very configurable (I add tons of configuration options when I join a project), while remaining fast (Plucker is fast enough that I haven't been able to switch to Android as my main ebook platform, as I haven't yet found an Android ebook app that matches Plucker's abilities to search and load large files), pretty stable and not very large. Plucker is a good example here, as it runs on devices much more limited than early Kindles. The latest version I have is only 278K for the binaries and probably doesn't use more than about 80K of heap RAM (and that's being conservative), and I normally underclock my PalmTX to 200mhz for it (compare to a Kindle 2 with 32mb RAM and a 500MHz processor).

One real issue with complex configuration stuff is that users get lost in many pages of configuration, and that's probably been an issue in the projects I've been on. But that's easily handled by having a separate Advanced section.

[djgreedo]

The progress bar is not available on my new Kindle Touch. Very frustrating. I never know how long I have to read in a chapter. If I could see that the next chapter is short I can choose to read it before I go to sleep. I am flying blind without it.

The methods used to display reading progress are flawed in my opinion. Locations are unintuitive and unhelpful except in very specific circumstances (though there is a need for a way to locate specific places across editions). The entire industry should agree on a way to identify a place in a book regardless of book format.

Page numbers is anachronistic and backwards looking. It's forcing a new technology to inherit the drawbacks of an old one. I can't imagine it is particularly useful since it only works on a specific edition of a paper book anyway, and it's not intuitive to follow page numbers when a screen of text is a fraction of a page.

% doesn't work well in my experience, especially in non-fiction. I recently read a really long non-fiction book that ended at about the 70% mark due to all the endnotes and index taking up 30%. I would like to have a better idea of where I am in a book. Can't they work out a way to disregard the end matter when calculating % read? It can't be difficult, but I don't know enough about the ebook file formats to know if a section can be tagged in such a way so that it is ignored in the % calculation. Or could they simply have a marker at the end of the main book and have that recognised as the 100% point?

I think Amazon can do better than this. A screen number would be perfect for me. It's closest to a paper book (i.e. a screen is a page), it's the most intuitive (anyone can understand it immediately, which is not the case for locations), and intuitively '130 of 300' makes more sense than a %.

I don't reference ebooks at all, but wouldn't it make more sense to have an option for referencing where you could bring up a list of information, such as location and paper book page numbers for ALL known print editions of the book rather than tying an ebook to a single print edition? FWIW when I was at university and we had conflicting editions of books it was never a problem to find a passage by something along the lines of 'Chapter 8, near the end of the chapter, paragraph starting with "Bob picked up the sausage and..." '. I don't see why Amazon places more emphasis on this type of information than it does on giving the reader a more intuitive experience. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would guess that the vast majority of Kindle users just read the books without the need to reference sections of compare position with a paper book.

Surely it makes sense for the default (or most visible) progress indicator to be the one most useful and intuitive the the reader. And surely with the technology and data available they can do a better job of giving that extra information to those who need it.

It seems to me that Amazon (and probably other ereader makers) are introducing limitations and inconveniences that don't need to exist given the power and data at their disposal.

[readingwonder]

I personally can't stand the way the Kindle lays out pages. I by far prefer the way epubs and epub ereaders do it. The page numbers might not correspond directly to the print book, but they still have page numbers and nice chapter breaks, where the text goes partway down the screen and then stops and the rest of the screen is clear, then you turn the page and the next chapter begins, along with a new page.

Epubs, for me, give more of a feel of reading a book, which I like.

[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by readingwonder

nice chapter breaks, where the text goes partway down the screen and then stops and the rest of the screen is clear, then you turn the page and the next chapter begins, along with a new page.

That's the formatting of the individual book, not the reading device. Most Kindle books behave this way (though it frustrates me how many are badly formatted!).

[kennyc]

Locations and percentages suck. Page numbers are the way to go ... based on a set characters per page value.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Locations and percentages suck. Page numbers are the way to go ... based on a set characters per page value.

That what location are. You just don't seem to care for the number of characters others have chosen.