The viewer's calculation of number of pages in a book?

John IV · 06-04-2023, 01:35 AM

I've been interested lately in figuring out how my ebooks' Kindle 'locations' would map to a number of physical pages in say a mass market paperback.

The location number doesn't change regardless of margin/font tweak etc. So there seems to be a few 'rough' ways to do it.

For example, location x 23 to get total number of words, then divide by mass market paperback words per page so like 300.

Anyhow, I noticed the other day that the Calibre e-book viewer can display the location in the book and (total?) pages in the footer in the lower right and it appears to be analogous to page number. Do we know how this is calculated?

kovidgoyal · 06-04-2023, 02:10 AM

The viewer is open source, you can read the code and see for yourself. IIRC it strips html tags takes a word count and divides by a fixed number of words per page.

John IV · 06-04-2023, 03:58 PM

Thanks Kovid, I'm not a programmer but I was looking on GitHub to see if I could spy where the viewer's code lived, but wasn't seeing it.

06-04-2023, 01:35 AM	#1
John IV Member Posts: 22 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2022 Device: Kindle Scribe	The viewer's calculation of number of pages in a book? I've been interested lately in figuring out how my ebooks' Kindle 'locations' would map to a number of physical pages in say a mass market paperback. The location number doesn't change regardless of margin/font tweak etc. So there seems to be a few 'rough' ways to do it. For example, location x 23 to get total number of words, then divide by mass market paperback words per page so like 300. Anyhow, I noticed the other day that the Calibre e-book viewer can display the location in the book and (total?) pages in the footer in the lower right and it appears to be analogous to page number. Do we know how this is calculated?

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06-04-2023, 02:10 AM	#2
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 43,844 Karma: 22666666 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	The viewer is open source, you can read the code and see for yourself. IIRC it strips html tags takes a word count and divides by a fixed number of words per page.

06-04-2023, 03:58 PM	#3
John IV Member Posts: 22 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2022 Device: Kindle Scribe	Thanks Kovid, I'm not a programmer but I was looking on GitHub to see if I could spy where the viewer's code lived, but wasn't seeing it.

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