Kindle Page Number Proposal

[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You can see where you are in the book from the percentage - this is always displayed, and is (IMHO) a much more useful figure.

The percentage doesn't give the same information as a screen number would. You can't easily tell from 74% how much you have left to read - it could be a few pages in a short book or it could be a couple of hundred pages. A screen number is far more intuitive (it's relatable to the amount of text on your screen), and it gives you enough information to know where you are and a rough idea of your actual progress. I'm surprised this point is missed so easily.

[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

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.

Having a screen number is EXACTLY the same as page numbers on a physical book. You know the total number of pages, the page you're on, and the amount of text on a page.

Depending on your reading scenario this information can be vital, and it's always useful.

I can understand if you don't care to follow your progress through a book but I can't understand why anyone would think that it's not something a lot of readers benefit from greatly.

[djgreedo]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

But with an ebook, a page/screen is a moving target. It's fluid... not always the same. So what's the point of trying to tag it with static properties?—other than dogma and paradigm, of course.

Yes the ebook is the evolution of the book. And "The page" is an evolved book's appendix. It might hang about, but what the heck does it really do?

Utter nonsense.

Saying the 'page' is some sort out outdated relic of paper books is silly when we're talking about the Kindle, which divides text into screens, which work the same way as pages.

YES, we should not let ebooks be held back by the limitations of paper books, but we should not expect all aspects of the paper book - a very established and successful technology - to go away simply because there are other ways of doing things.

You try to make this issue out to be something along the lines of readers complaining that they miss the smell of paper. The issue is that Amazon has made their e-reader worse at tracking reading location and progress than a 400-year-old paper book, and not because the technology has limitations, but because they are trying too hard to reinvent the wheel.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

You try to make this issue out to be something along the lines of readers complaining that they miss the smell of paper.

That's utter nonsense. Because that's not what I'm trying to suggest at all. I literally meant the term "page" or "screen" is fluid and not a concrete concept in any reflowable document. Follow a footnote link and then click the return link and see if it takes you back to the same "screen" with all the exact same words that were on it before you left. Then click the previous page button a couple of times and try to get back to that exact same "screen." Never mind when someone resizes the whole book by changing the words per line setting.

So when I suggest it's silly trying to assign a static page/screen/click number to something that doesn't really exist... I'm not referring to some artsy-fartsy concept of pages similar to the "smell of a book." I'm talking about how reflowing ebooks work in general. Concretely. I'm not waxing philosophical, here.

[pruss]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That's utter nonsense. Because that's not what I'm trying to suggest at all. I literally meant the term "page" or "screen" is fluid and not a concrete concept in any reflowable document. Follow a footnote link and then click the return link and see if it takes you back to the same "screen" with all the exact same words that were on it before you left. Then click the previous page button a couple of times and try to get back to that exact same "screen." Never mind when someone resizes the whole book by changing the words per line setting.

If it doesn't come back to the same screen, isn't that a (very minor) bug? Or at least it doesn't seem how paging should be implemented. For one, it messes with one's spatial memory for the text. (With print books, it is not uncommon to remember which part of a page a passage was on.)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pruss

If it doesn't come back to the same screen, isn't that a (very minor) bug? Or at least it doesn't seem how paging should be implemented. For one, it messes with one's spatial memory for the text. (With print books, it is not uncommon to remember which part of a page a passage was on.)

It's a "feature" of Mobipocket that a page back doesn't exactly "undo" a page forward. It's the way it's always worked, right back to the earliest Mobi readers, which were a heck of a long time before the Kindle was a twinkle in Amazon's eye.

[bluerfoot]

The more I think about the more it seems making a "page" the number of screen turns left in the book really makes sense. would it be that hard for the kindle to recalculate on the fly when you change screen size?

if I could have a progress bar, total swipes till book end (pages) and total swipes till chapter end I would be a happy man. I think amazon went overboard trying to make the screen sparse. I read mostly technical books on the kindle and it is really hard to get a feel for where you are with
-- no chapter indication
-- no progress bar
-- cryptic locations

I think if I was just reading novels it would not be an issue but in books where you are constantly cross referencing stuff just location and a percent is really not cutting it for me.

[markbot]

Originally Posted by bluerfoot

The more I think about the more it seems making a "page" the number of screen turns left in the book really makes sense. would it be that hard for the kindle to recalculate on the fly when you change screen size?

if I could have a progress bar, total swipes till book end (pages) and total swipes till chapter end I would be a happy man. I think amazon went overboard trying to make the screen sparse. I read mostly technical books on the kindle and it is really hard to get a feel for where you are with
-- no chapter indication
-- no progress bar
-- cryptic locations

I think if I was just reading novels it would not be an issue but in books where you are constantly cross referencing stuff just location and a percent is really not cutting it for me.

That's a good point. I definitely wouldn't mind chapter indications.

[pruss]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's a "feature" of Mobipocket that a page back doesn't exactly "undo" a page forward. It's the way it's always worked, right back to the earliest Mobi readers, which were a heck of a long time before the Kindle was a twinkle in Amazon's eye.

I guess it's not a bug, but a carry-over of what was a reasonable design decision on an early Palm with limited memory, but is no longer a reasonable design decision.

On a limited memory device there is going to be a choice between limited memory one will have a trade-off between slow paging, at least in reverse, and unpredictable reverse paging. In Plucker, the issue was solved differently, at the cost of slow paging both forwards and backwards in documents with large paragraphs and some additional memory use.

On a modern device with oodles of RAM (all Kindles have oodles of RAM by the standards of early Palms), this is a poor design decision. One wants to be able to find the exact place one was reading more easily when one jumps to a footnote or forward and then comes back.