Kindle Page Number Proposal

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Larla

Yup --

Thanks a lot... that makes my decision to never own one a lot easier.

Seriously, I had no idea. If the KT has no progress bar... it's no wonder you're mostly unsatisfied with the graphical positional indicators. I would be too.

However, I don't feel it obviates the need for screen numbers; particularly if you could see how many screens until next chapter or end of book. The progress line is good but not precise. For that you need screen #'s.

I seriously don't get how knowing the exact number of clicks you are away from the end of the book chapter/chapter could be useful. And it's certainly not anything you had available to you with physical books (page turns) without stopping to do some math.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Thanks a lot... that makes my decision to never own one a lot easier.

Seriously, I had no idea. If the KT has no progress bar... it's no wonder you're mostly unsatisfied with the graphical positional indicators. I would be too.

The KT goes for an absolutely "clean screen" look - as little as possible to distract you from the book. It shows the location number in the lower left corner of the screen, and your percentage of the way through the book in the lower right corner.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I have no interest in having an ebook exactly simulate the experience of a reading a physical book. If I wanted that... I'd read physical books and completely echew ebooks.

I don't want to touch the "pages" to turn them. I don't want to turn my ereader over to read the words printed on the opposite screen. I don't want multiple, entirely blank screens separating sections. I don't want to be forced into using the typeface/size the publisher/author has chosen. And I certainly don't want to use a location system that's based on a physical reading medium that I'm not currently using.

What would be the point of completely re-creating the exact same experience as a physical book, when we already have physical books, if that's what someone obviously prefers?

Well, you are different than most. Most people like the familiarity of books and how they work. The advantage of the e-reader is the storage and ability to search. The disadvantage is the lack of ability to browse a book and to be able to tell where you are "in" the book by simple viewing the size of pages on the left vs the size of pages on the right.

I don't want an ebook reading experience to be like reading on a computer, I do that all day long, I want the book to be an escape from that.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kennyc

The disadvantage is the lack of ability to browse a book and to be able to tell where you are "in" the book by simple viewing the size of pages on the left vs the size of pages on the right.

The percentage figure shows you that.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The percentage figure shows you that.

Not in the same way.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Not in the same way.

In a better way, to my mind. You don't have to say to yourself: "let's see - there are about 3x as many pages on the left as there are on the right, so I must be about three quarters of the way through the book." On the Kindle you just look at the bottom of the page and it says "75%". What could be clearer?

[DiapDealer]

I don't want an ebook reading experience to be like reading on a computer, I do that all day long, I want the book to be an escape from that.

Me too. I'm all about the words. So because of that, I'm all for keeping useless numbers off of my screen. And knowing exactly how many clicks I have remaining is the perfect example of a useless number to me.

I never stopped to do the math when I was reading physical books, either. So for me, the progress bar on an ereader more closely represents that act of "eyeballing" how much reading you have left in a physical book.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

In a better way, to my mind. You don't have to say to yourself: "let's see - there are about 3x as many pages on the left as there are on the right, so I must be about three quarters of the way through the book." On the Kindle you just look at the bottom of the page and it says "75%". What could be clearer?

That's fine Harry, you can have it, I'm just expressing the difference. When you are reading a physical book you have an immediate intuitive understanding of where you are in the book without having to "calculate" anything. Intuitive understanding is MUCH clearer for most people.

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by kennyc

That's fine Harry, you can have it, I'm just expressing the difference. When you are reading a physical book you have an immediate intuitive understanding of where you are in the book without having to "calculate" anything. Intuitive understanding is MUCH clearer for most people.

Except people aren't asking for intuitive information, they want meaningless hard numbers.

The percentage bar is intuitive; displaying a screen page number on your e-reader is specific, yet useless.

[kennyc]

And now we've moved totally beyond what was being discussed in my post which was the feel of reading a pbook and knowing how far along you are intuitively as compared to reading an ebook that has a completely different feel and intuition about reading.

I agree the display bar can be similar, but that is not displayed constantly in the kindle app or in other incarnations of the kindle (I'm not certain of this as I don't own them all like Harry ) But I do know the progress bar is not displayed contantly on the Kindle Fire which I use for much of my ebook reading atm.

[JoeD]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Unfortunately that's completely useless for referring to a point in the book. Your page 125 is almost certainly not going to be the same as somebody else's page 125. Why do you actually care how many screens you've gone through?

Those are two distinct issues though imo, whilst locations could work for both sides I don't think it's the ideal solution.

Percentage bars are fine for many to see general progress, locations are fine for others that want to reference specific sections, but having an extra option to show how many screens are left would be great imo.

I don't find it intuitive to gauge how far I've to go with locations, I tend to use the progress bar for a rough indication, however when I near the end of a book I'd really like to know I'm only X screens from the end as I'll then tend to just spend another 10 minutes to finish off the book that night. When I see I've 30,560 locations to go, I don't have a clue how long that's going to take me to read. When I see I've 10 screens left I know close enough how much I've to read time wise. When I see 99% on the progress bar, I again don't really know, because I often don't remember how many pages it took to cause it to increment by 1% nor how far into that 99% I may have been when I stopped the night before. Screen numbers would solve that.

The "screens" concept could be taken further too, when initially working out how many screens there will be, it'd be possible to note the length of each chapter so instead of seeing X / X screens as book total you could see X screens to end of chapter. Again an optional feature due to the extra processing required on opening a book or making a font size change.

In terms of pages, I think that only makes sense if it's in reference to a physical edition which is afaik something amazon has already implemented for supporting books.

All that said, so long as the progress bar is available with tick marks for each chapter location, I'm happy enough. Screen numbers are by no means a vital issue for me, they'd just be nice imo.

[Stewart Grove]

I'm with you Larla. I have just got a Kindle and straight away noticed the lack of page numbers. Your idea of screen numbers sounds ideal.

In the mean time i've been trying this plugin which seems to do some good:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=126220

[Larla]

Yes, I also was quite interested in this plugin. By modifying the plugin you can even create something very close to screen numbers. There are constants in the plugin related to # of lines and characters per line. In the official plugin these constants are fetched from a website with information on the print book and therefore generate something very close to print page numbers.

By modifying the plugin you could changes these constants to something that agrees with your current font and spacing settings. The modified plugin would then generate screen numbers.

Unfortunately, you still have to call up the header info bar to see this page number; therefore I find it much less useful. I want the page number where I can see it all the time -- at the bottom of the page (screen).

[soulfuldog]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The KT goes for an absolutely "clean screen" look - as little as possible to distract you from the book. It shows the location number in the lower left corner of the screen, and your percentage of the way through the book in the lower right corner.

So does that mean you lose the ability to see how near you are to the end of a chapter? I find the percentage is fine, but having only recently discovered the progress bar also shows where the chapters end, that'd be a miss for me.

[kiwidude]

I don't use the chapter markers myself, it took me months before I figured out what they were. Since they are (a) dependent on your book having chapters defined in a particular way and (b) too small to use in a book with a lot of chapters I just never look at it. So for me the graphic indicator is of no value at all, given the % is visible which gives me an even more precise number that mentally I would have been interpreting a graphic bar into anyway.

I posted my anti-location feelings six months ago or so here along with countless others. To those posters who are defending locations by claiming "only" new Kindle users complain - I would suggest it isn't because all users get "used to" locations, its because of recognition of the seeming futility in doing so.

What Amazon *did* thankfully eventually do with a firmware release for K3 owners at least was get location numbers out of our face, relegating them quite rightly to only visible when the Menu button is pressed. I like that approach - the minority who do have a need to see some byte number for reference purposes have access to it, and the rest of us just reading fiction for pleasure get to not see it. Unlucky for some (not that I will ever buy a touch only reader anyways) that doesn't sound like that is the case for the KT.

Personally I would be happier if they also took % off my K3 screen - great to have it available, but a distraction when there all the time. I find myself consciously calculating how many screen pages it takes to see 1% of progress - something I would never be doing if reading a paperback. Put it on the menu so at any point I do want to know I can glance at it, in the same way I would rotate a physical book to look at the spine.

No method of measuring progress is going to be foolproof given the amount of crap that gets stuffed into the back of books, be it some sort of appendices, preview of an upcoming book or whatever. So even saying I am at 90% I don't really know if the book will run to 100% or end at 91%. No solution is going to solve that beyond some sort of additional metadata/standard defining where a story starts & begins - i.e. it ain't going to happen. Hence why I would prefer seeing no progress indicators at all on screen while reading giving me an extra line of text space, with a simple button press to show me when I do want it.

As for working out whether to read to the end of the chapter/next chapter, my solution is far simpler. I just read at night until I fall asleep . The only danger in this approach is of rolling over onto the Kindle but it has survived the last year of this approach...