Page Numbers, Percentage, or nothing at all

[John F]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Curious as to why no progress bar, the way Kobo implemented it it is very unlikely that the bar will prohibit you from maximizing text. At least I've not yet found a mixture of settings which will allow the text to come to the very bottom edge of the screen (it comes close, but there's still space enough for the progress bar).

Unless it's just to have a cleaner display of course.

Because that's what I currently have. (no progress bar) Plus, I would want a progress bar for the current chapter. If it is the current chapter, I would need to check the chapter actual length occasionally to figure out how long the chapter was. A progress bar with chapter ticks would be helpful for shorter books, but once the length of the book gets longer, the ticks become less helpful.

I want to read. I try to stop on chapter breaks. I want a quick way to determine how long a chapter is (should I continue reading or stop for this session) and how much I have left to finish a chapter (I know I'm falling asleep and will I be able to stay awake end of the chapter or not).

If a progress bar is an option, great. I just have my doubts as to how practical it would be for me, or if I would turn it off because it isn't useful for me (like the progress bar in the current Kobo firmware).

For me, overall book progress isn't of primary importance, and it being one or two clicks away is fine.

[4691mls]

I'm guessing a chapter progress bar would actually provide you with a better visual cue than the book progress bar, because 1. A chapter bar wouldn't include extras (the book bar includes excerpts etc at the end of the book) and 2. A chapter is shorter so the chapter bar would start off bigger and move visibly faster than a book bar.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ratinox

What's amusing to me about this is that ADE pages are in fact based on screen size and point size. One ADE page is approximately 1K of text or about 1/4 of one 8.5x11" printed page with 10 point text or about one screen's worth of text on a 6" reader.

ADE page numbers may very well have been designed to be roughly 1 page = 1 screen on 6" Reader. But, there are a number of factors that determine the page count and how much is in a page. For example, if you streamline the code in an ePub you make the page count more accurate. That means that instead of doing a <p class="indent"> for every normal indented paragraph, you fix the CSS code so you just need <p>. That makes more of the 1024 bytes be the actual book and less of the code.

ADE page numbers work for larger screens. My H2O screen is 6.8". Newer Readers can be 7", 7.8", 8" 10.3" or 13". You do get used to the page numbers once you've settled on what settings for your eBook work for you.

As far as Kobo goes, I like ADE page numbers with the new progress bar. That gives even more information then before.

ADE pages cannot be any more precise because ADE pages and percentages are the same numbers. Don't confuse what the numbers are with how they are displayed. Percentages could easily be displayed with decimal parts. I don't know if this is a good idea or not.

If ADE page numbers are not a percentage. if they were, then you would have no more then 100 pages. pBook page numbers are as much a percentage as ADE page numbers and that is not at all. They are an indicator of where you are in your book. But the difference between ADE page numbers and percent is that with percent, you have no idea how long/large the eBook is. So if you are at25%, you don't know how much you have left. 75% doesn't say how much is left. Now if you have ADE pages and you are on page 25 of 175, you know how long you have left.

ollowing your reasoning and tempering with the origin of ADE pages which appear to beloved around here I come to the conclusion that the only self-consistent way to numerically paginate an ebook on an ebook reading device is by page turns.

ADE page numbers are not governed by your settings. They don't change when you change the font, font-size, margins, or line-height. They don't change if you have headers or footers being displayed or not. They are the same on a 6" screen or an 8" screen. So if I tell you something is on page 34, it is on page 34 on your device. If I was reading where one screen = 1 page, I could not tell you that something was on page 34 as page 34 on my device would not be page 34 on yours.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Progress through the ebook? The same as it would in a physical book as much as possible. For the instances where a page doesn't line up with the screen have it display the lower page number.

So if something is on page 435 of a physical book, but your settings on your ereader have it so it's displayed on screen with page 434 the ereader would display 434.

It'll still eventually flip to 435, and you'd not have to page back more than one page to find the quote. Still imprecise compared to physical books, but a large step closer than either ADE or Kobo's current or prior methods.

As I said earlier, it's making a broken system work as much as possible, since creating a truly universal system is going to be impossible without limiting screen size, text size, line spacing, margins, font, kerning, etc. etc.

If you want page numbers to work as you are describing, then get a Kindle. That's how they work. Amazon's page number file lines up with some pBook version of the eBook. The only thing I am not sure of is when the screen crosses a page number boundary if it uses the higher or lower number.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Different books, different numbers. If the book does not contain page number mapping (either page-map or pagelist), what the Adobe epub synthetic page number algorithm offers is that no matter what device you read on, the same epub file will have page 32 will start at the same point.

I'm pretty sure I acknowledged this as the only case where faux pages are reliably consistent.

As for your example, do you have⁠—at hand⁠—an example of two pbooks where the page numbers in the text only version lined up with the page numbers in the illustrated edition with 16 full page illustrations in the first 32 pages? Preferably two editions with the same font/font size/line and/or paragraph spacing, margins/etc and a page number assigned to each of the full page illustrations.

The example is not necessarily an illustrated edition of Book A and a non-illustrated edition of Book A, but Book A and Book B where A is illustrated and B is not. Page 32 in both A and B are the same position in physical editions of each book. Faux page 32 is different positions in electronic editions of A and B because neither ADE nor Kepub account for images in their countings.

I dislike this inconsistency across different books. Counting page turns solves this particular problem but introduces a bunch of others.

Long story short: there is no synthetic page counting algorithm that will work consistently in all cases.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you want page numbers to work as you are describing, then get a Kindle. That's how they work. Amazon's page number file lines up with some pBook version of the eBook. The only thing I am not sure of is when the screen crosses a page number boundary if it uses the higher or lower number.

I actually don’t want page numbers at all. I find them pointless on something much more akin to a scroll than a book (especially if the device or app you’ve using allows for swiping up or down etc).

[icallaci]

So, this topic haunted my dreams last night, and I came up with this: Last Wednesday, I went to the grocery store and bought apples and oranges. By Sunday, I had eaten 50% of the apples but only 10% of the oranges. How many apples did I eat? How many oranges? Do I need to buy more of either to avoid running out? My point is that percentages are incomplete and meaningless without context. In an ebook, I need some indication of the total number of "pages-work-as-well-as-anything-else" to compare where I started, where I am now, how much farther I have to go, etc. And since different versions of the same printed book do not share consistent page numbers, I have no expectation that an ebook would conform to some other format's page-numbering system. I like Kobo's decision to put chapter progress and book progress on the screen together, because it gives me information I find useful. Would I prefer static page numbers versus page numbers based on screen and font size? Perhaps. Would I prefer only percentages? Definitely not! As Jon noted, using percentage by itself turns every book into 100 "pages" anyway, with each book's "page-length" varying wildly, which would drive me crazy. (By the way, I ate 2 apples and 4 oranges, which feels counterintuitive when the only information available is percentage.)

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I actually don’t want page numbers at all. I find them pointless on something much more akin to a scroll than a book (especially if the device or app you’ve using allows for swiping up or down etc).

As long as there's an option to hide/turn off page numbers (no matter what numbering system is used) then I guess you are all set!

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by icallaci

So, this topic haunted my dreams last night, and I came up with this: Last Wednesday, I went to the grocery store and bought apples and oranges. By Sunday, I had eaten 50% of the apples but only 10% of the oranges. How many apples did I eat? How many oranges? Do I need to buy more of either to avoid running out? My point is that percentages are incomplete and meaningless without context.

But you do have context: you know how many apples and oranges you purchased. If you bought six apples and ate 50% of them then you know you ate three apples.

This works exactly the same with an ebook. If you know a book is 250,000 characters and you've read 15% of the book then you know you've read about 37,500 characters. These are unwieldly numbers so publishers usually count words.

A word is 5 keystrokes in professional typing. It's based on the average lengths of the most commonly used words in the English language. This is the basis of "words per minute" or WPM. I've heard that some publishers use 6 keystrokes/characters per word. Regardless, word count is a thing that generally makes sense to readers: a short novel is about 50K words while a mainstream novel is about twice that. Maybe counting words is the solution.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

As long as there's an option to hide/turn off page numbers (no matter what numbering system is used) then I guess you are all set!

Yep the current firmware even unpatched gives me what I want in this regard. Most of my replies in this thread are simply seeking a better page numbering system for people who want page numbers since the ones we have are faulty in various areas.

@icallaci why not use percentage and time remaining which are both offered by kobo and won’t change with any change you make in the settings. Yes the estimated time might not perfectly align with the time you really take but I’d have to imagine you’ll get a sense of the difference. And since even ADE page numbers will count content you’re not going to read they’re probably both equally accurate in the end.

[Gibbo]

I feel a headache coming

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by ratinox

But you do have context: you know how many apples and oranges you purchased. If you bought six apples and ate 50% of them then you know you ate three apples.

This works exactly the same with an ebook. If you know a book is 250,000 characters and you've read 15% of the book then you know you've read about 37,500 characters. These are unwieldly numbers so publishers usually count words.

My point exactly. I know how many apples and oranges I purchased. Nobody else does. When I open an ebook and see only a percentage on the screen, I have no other information for my mental estimates. The publisher knows how many characters are in the book, but I do not, unless I go somewhere else to look it up and then either write it down or remember it. Why should I do that if the information can be displayed right there in the same place that percentage or page number or character count is displayed?

[adamslast]

I prefere a page with page numbers at footer and book name at header as older fws. But as well as I know there is not a patch provide it. Is there another way to do it?

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

@icallaci why not use percentage and time remaining which are both offered by kobo and won’t change with any change you make in the settings. Yes the estimated time might not perfectly align with the time you really take but I’d have to imagine you’ll get a sense of the difference. And since even ADE page numbers will count content you’re not going to read they’re probably both equally accurate in the end.

Why not use percentage and time remaining? Because my mental estimates are based not just on my reading speed or the number of words remaining, but on what kind of environment I am reading in (a doctor's office with the TV going, my own quiet living room, a park with children and conversations and music all vying for my attention, in my car waiting impatiently for someone to hurry up and get back so we can go home already, a stadium with 40,000 screaming fans), as well as other factors. I can do it better and take into account more factors than any algorithm yet created. But most of all, because the information I personally find useful is already provided, while people who don't want to see that information don't have to.

[Ripplinger]

It seems like we're beating a dead horse here. Some of us will prefer page numbers whether accurate or not, some will only want exact page numbers that would match a physical book or some magical equation, some prefer a percentage whether they know what it's based on or not, some of us want it per chapter and some per book only, and some don't give a flying leap about any of it. No one is wrong in what they prefer to use, just like we all prefer our favorite font and no one is wrong there either.

For myself, I prefer to see page numbers for the book, as xx / xxx. I don't care if it's accurate to match anything else, it gives me what my mind prefers to roughly know what's left in a book. That doesn't mean if I didn't have it that way I wouldn't buy the reader. But if there is a way to make it the way I prefer either through settings or patches, of course I'll do it.

And now add in thoughts about time remaining... there are endless possibilities of combinations between percentages, pages, time, chapters, word counts, that make my head hurt. Just use what you prefer and don't belittle anyone for wanting it a different way.