Kindle Page Number Proposal

[ApK]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

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!).

Correct, not the reader, nor the file format.

[haydnfan]

It would be nice if you simply had an option of choosing up to two out of: location #s, percentage, page #s, progress bar.

As far as screen page #s go, if you set the font to one up from default, and minimal line spacing there will be roughly 10 locations per page so you can just divide the location #s by 10 for the page #s.

As far as real pages go if you don't have one with the apnx I use the approximate guideline of 1000 locations = 50 pages. It seems to work reasonably well in most books for a rough estimate.

[kennyc]

Wrong, I don't care for the way it's displayed on Kindles, with pages there is intuitive understanding of where you are in the book and tables of contents should reflect them. This is not the way the kindle/mobi system works.

Just a friggin location 1238765 means NOTHING, there is nothing to relate it to, it is not used in relation to the end of the book or story and is not used for chapters. It is worthless the way it is implemented. The Sony method of implementing page numbers in epub is the way to go.

[DiapDealer]

Gotta disagree with you there Kenny. But that's OK... it doesn't happen very often.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Gotta disagree with you there Kenny. But that's OK... it doesn't happen very often.

That's okay, some people LIKE driving blindfolded.

[kennyc]

What's interesting for those that have owned or been around Kindle for a while is how often the objection to the location/percentage thing comes up. That in itself should be an indication of an issue of some kind.

[DiapDealer]

Actually it comes up with new owners all the time and then they get used to it and move on.

It never tripped me up from the beginning. It's just your average X-number of X-total progress scale. Overall progress in the book is easy to see, as well as how close I am to the end of a chapter (provided the ebook creator isn't a complete idiot).

If it's mostly text (novels), I know that 5000-7000 is a fairly average sized book and anything over 10000 is approaching doorstop proportions.

I never really paid attention to page numbers with physical books either... just open to the bookmark and continue reading. Isn't that how most people do it?

I guess one arbitrary number is as good as the next as far as I'm concerned.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Wrong, I don't care for the way it's displayed on Kindles, with pages there is intuitive understanding of where you are in the book and tables of contents should reflect them. This is not the way the kindle/mobi system works.

Just a friggin location 1238765 means NOTHING,

What are you talking about? It's always some location out of some other number. If it's location 1200 of 12000, you're about a tenth in.

"Page 132" also means nothing if you don't know how many pages there are.

Similarly, about the end matter, I've been similarly surprised at how many pages were left after "finishing" a paper back. Unless you flip through the book first, and see how much and matter there is and what page the book ends on, it's the same as the kindle. And similarly, you can flip to the end of a book on the Kindle and see where the main part ends if that matters to you.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by 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

A minor correction; it's actually a count of 128 bytes. 8 locations = 1k.

[pruss]

One reason not to tie things to screen numbers is that paging by screenfuls, rather than more flexible scrolling, is itself a left-over from dead-tree technology. :-)

Another complication is that not all books are best divided in the same way. A lot of non-fiction books have logical subdivisions worked out by the author. For instance, my book on the Principle of Sufficient Reason is divided into three parts, each of which is divided into several chapters, each of which is divided into several sections, and some of the sections are divided to subsections and subsubsections (e.g., "7.4.2.b"). Logical subdivisions should be preferred to artificial subdivisions.

On the other hand, a number of classic books have their own standard accepted numbering. For instance, the Bible gets cited by book, chapter and verse. Homer is cited by book and line number. Shakespeare gets cited by play, act and scene, with an additional line number as needed. Plato gets cited by Stephanus page numbers (page numbers in Stephanus' 1578 edition) followed by letters that subdivide each page into five sections and often line numbers that subdivide these. Aristotle can be cited by work, book, chapter and section, but is more commonly cited by page number in the 19th century Bekker Greek edition followed by either "a" or "b" to designate the column (it was a two-column edition) and line number. Kant's First Critique gets cited by a pair of page numbers, corresponding to standard German editions of the first and second versions of the text.

There just isn't one a standard way to number things. This makes me think that the ideal would be to have two different location designators. One would be a standardized position whose meaning is relatively independent of the work in question. At least for Western materials, this could be something like section and paragraph numbers for prose (with "section" having different meaning in different works, but always trying to keep to a similar sort of logical or literary division; a chapter for a typical contemporary novel, a "book" for Plato's Republic, etc.), act/scene for plays, section (if available) and line number for poetry, and work-number or title plus the above standard designator for anthologies of the above (so, for an anthology of plays, play title, plus act and scene). These have the merit of being to a great extent a logical and/or literary subdivision rather than merely artificial. While the levels of subdivision would be standardized, and there would be standardized names for the subdivision ("section", "line", "paragraph" in English), the levels could also get "localized" to the work in question. Thus, for Plato's Republic, the "section" could be called "Book" while for a modern novel it could be called "chapter".

And then, in addition to the paragraph numbers, there should be numbering in whatever scheme is either customary for the book in question in the case of older books (e.g., book, chapter and verse for the Bible, Bekker numbers for Aristotle, etc.) or numbering in the author's and/or editor's chosen scheme for contemporary works. A decision how to divide up a work is, after all, a creative division, and as such should be left to the author and/or editor if these are contemporary.

Then it would be up to the reader which, if any, to display in a status line: uniform designators or customary/author/editor designators, and whether to display "out of" information in the case of uniform designators (e.g., "7.14" for chapter 7, paragraph 14, or something like "7/12: 14/128" for chapter 7 of 12, paragraph 14 of 128). The reader would also be able to look up passages by using either uniform or customary/author/editor designators.

Hopefully, with time, more and more works would get cited by uniform designators and dead-tree books would print uniform designators in the page head/foot, though there may always be cases where greater precision is needed than uniform designators provide (like the precision provide by verse numbers in the Bible or Bekker line numbers in Aristotle), and it might be good to enrich the prose uniform designators with a genre-dependent sub-paragraph division.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A minor correction; it's actually a count of 128 bytes. 8 locations = 1k.

Check the updated Wiki...
... and this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=159357

[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Wrong, I don't care for the way it's displayed on Kindles, with pages there is intuitive understanding of where you are in the book and tables of contents should reflect them. This is not the way the kindle/mobi system works.

I agree. To me a 'page' number corresponding to an actual screen of content (determined by the current font size, etc., and therefore dynamic) is what I want. It's closest to what I'm used to with a lifetime of paper books while also taking advantage of (or working with) the ebook reader's ability to scale font size and spacing.

To me, "Screen 230 of 480" tells me pretty much everything I need to know. I know roughly my progress (just less than 50% - I don't need to know exactly), and I can intuitively understand how much more reading I have to do based on a 'page' (i.e. screen) of text, just like with every book I've ever read before.

Just a friggin location 1238765 means NOTHING, there is nothing to relate it to, it is not used in relation to the end of the book or story and is not used for chapters. It is worthless the way it is implemented. The Sony method of implementing page numbers in epub is the way to go.

On my current book I get:
Loc 3095 71%

Apart from knowing I'm 71% through the book I know little else. From that information I can't tell how long the book is, how long it might take me to read that extra 29% - is that half an hour of reading to go or 1000 screens of text? And the location number tells me nothing except what is essentially an arbitrary location that is only useful when telling someone else where I am in a book, which is not something that is useful very often. It too gives no indication as to the overall progress.

As for end matter - in a paper book I usually have a quick look at how much of that stuff is there, or I sometimes will use the index and/or notes during the course of reading and have a fair idea of how much of the book's thickness is 'after the end'. That's a lot trickier with an ebook as it involves fiddling around. The Kindle could easily implement a solution (e.g. bring back the progress bar and shade the end matter section darker or something to indicate that material is end matter).

Take advantage of this new medium to make the reading experience better! Your mention of stories and chapters brings up another point: why can't the Kindle also have separate progress indicators for individual stories in a collection, for example? What about those public domain collections of, for example, all the Oz books? Show me 'Screen 50 of 2000 (Current story screen 50 of 243)" or something.

I'm on my 3rd Kindle now, and I think it's about time Amazon started innovating to make reading on the Kindle better than paper books in every way imaginable.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Check the updated Wiki...
... and this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=159357

Thank you - I'd missed that. That's extremely interesting!

[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by pruss

One reason not to tie things to screen numbers is that paging by screenfuls, rather than more flexible scrolling, is itself a left-over from dead-tree technology. :-)

Only in the sense that were equating a screen with a page. Since we're reading screen by screen I think it makes sense to track location by screens. I remember back in the old days reading on a PC with a long text file that you would scroll through rather than page through, but that doesn't suit e-ink (and is also perhaps counter-intuitive simply because we all grew up with paper books with pages).

A lot of non-fiction books have logical subdivisions worked out by the author. For instance, my book on the Principle of Sufficient Reason is divided into three parts, each of which is divided into several chapters, each of which is divided into several sections, and some of the sections are divided to subsections and subsubsections (e.g., "7.4.2.b"). Logical subdivisions should be preferred to artificial subdivisions.

There are two separate needs I think:
1) Keeping track of your position/progress for the 'normal' reader who just wants an idea of their progress through a book (to plan their reading ahead, for example)
2) Referencing a place in a book for scholarly/reference/sharing/book club type reasons.

For (1) I think screen numbers (perhaps with the option of % or something else), which should be the default shown permanently at the bottom of the screen at all times. That should suit most readers while reading.

For (2) there needs to be a universal way of referencing an exact place in a book regardless of the publisher, device, or edition, which is what Kindle's locations and 'real page' numbers are for (though I question their usefulness given that locations aren't used in other e-readers and the real page numbers are bound to a specific edition of the paper book. Other references such as an author's own organisation, should probably be left between the author and the reader, though I don't see any reason that the functionality couldn't be encoded in the books and used as an optional 3rd method for navigation.

[readingwonder]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

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!).

It must be a standard formatting guideline for epub then or something, because every epub book I've ever read has been like that except for one, and I think with that particular one, the original book itself used a different format and so the epub just follows the format of the original book.

I would be more tempted towards Kindle if all the Kindle books were formatted how the epub books are. Though for my personal preference, I prefer the openness and universality of epub.