Real Page Numbers for Reflowable Kindles

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Quick Side Note: Search in an ebook, while absolutely fantastic = a Concordance (a list of all the words in a book).

Yes - however I am thinking of a high quality search engine, which gives results with a sentence or so of context, not merely a list of page numbers on which the searched word appears.

That combined with a high-quality Table of Contents certainly gives me everything I could ever need. I'd ask for my money back on any book that had hard coded page numbers everywhere.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by meeera

Yes - however I am thinking of a high quality search engine, which gives results with a sentence or so of context, not merely a list of page numbers on which the searched word appears.

That combined with a high-quality Table of Contents certainly gives me everything I could ever need. I'd ask for my money back on any book that had hard coded page numbers everywhere.

Read the Page Number topic + put your thoughts together + post. I'll respond to you there! *hint hint nudge nudge* I think you will be glad you did.

I personally think that is one of the top-most informative threads on all of MobileRead.

Originally Posted by HarryT

I strongly disagree. A good index is far more than a simple list of words; it will provide guidance on broad topic areas of interest to the reader. Creating a good index is a highly skilled and specialised job.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by meeera

Yes - however I am thinking of a high quality search engine, which gives results with a sentence or so of context, not merely a list of page numbers on which the searched word appears.

That combined with a high-quality Table of Contents certainly gives me everything I could ever need. I'd ask for my money back on any book that had hard coded page numbers everywhere.

A simple example of something I could get from an index, but not a search:

The author Charles Dickens lived in many different houses over the course of his life. In a good biography of Dickens, I can look up "house" or "home" in the index, and I'll get a list of all the houses that Dickens lived in, with text references for each one. There is no simple search I could do in the book which would get me such a list. As I said in my previous post, an index allows you to search on topics rather than on just words that appear in the text.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A simple example of something I could get from an index, but not a search:

The author Charles Dickens lived in many different houses over the course of his life. In a good biography of Dickens, I can look up "house" or "home" in the index, and I'll get a list of all the houses that Dickens lived in, with text references for each one. There is no simple search I could do in the book which would get me such a list. As I said in my previous post, an index allows you to search on topics rather than on just words that appear in the text.

Yes, Harry:

I concur, completely. This is part of the conundrum, when I'm discussing this issue with a client or prospective client. This is why we started using the embedded ids, so as to create a linked index...but as I mentioned, it's cumbersome, at best, to use.

This is from the original post:

Quote:

I took that to be the reason.

Yes, but we all asked WHY, to tease out the actual usability issue. IOW, why do we WANT RPNs? (Real Page Numbers, I'm sick of typing it out.) What are the reasons?

1. An instructor in a course that will have people with both e- and print books, wants to be able to say "this week's coursework is from page X to Y."
2. We have an index, and want to be able to go directly to that page.
3. Now I'm out of reasons.

In the case of 1, you can do that with either a) the embedded id's linked to a back-of-book page map. Using the invisible (to the eye) id's, alone, doesn't QUITE get the less tech-savvy there, (and you can't really search for ids, using an on-device search), and that likely works best, and the least intrusively, for the user. Bear in mind, for this one, if you put images in, you can't search those. That makes those worse than useless, in my opinion. If you type page numbers in, and the book goes to (say) page 324, and you're searching for page 24, you'll get p. 24, 224, 324...and etc. This then combines the interrupted page appearance (which ALWAYS looks like you've made an error, to the buyer, and don't think that they won't hop, skip and jump to go tell Amazon about it!!!), and a form of search. So, this doesn't really emulate the user-friendliness of RPNs and thumbing, not really.

In the case of 2, we can all do what we've been doing--embed the page number as an id, and jump the user there, EXACTLY as they would have, using some page-flipping/thumbing, so that the person ends up at the top of the "page." Then, just like print, they are on their own to find the material "on the page" or screen(s). As I hope I explained, above, that has some real drawbacks.

I guess that 3 would be, "just because that's how it is in print, and I want it." I mean, to restate what I said, if you embed pngs, or jpegs, icons, whatever, you cannot search on those. That, to me, is pretty useless. No offense to the OP here. What's the point? What, the reader opens the file, and then click-click-clicks his way, to find page 158? Sweet moses on a pony. How user-friendly is that?

If there's some other aspect to having "real page numbers," I don't know what it is. I've now had 3 different folks, in the last few weeks, ask me to make FXL books for them, because they say that they HAVE TO HAVE RPNs. But the thing that gets me is, they can never really elucidate the WHY. As in, what functionality, from print, EXACTLY, is being replicated?

My issue isn't that we're unwilling to do what it takes, to make RPNs. My issue is the end-user experience. Amazon--and let's face it, ePUB or MOBI, those dudes are the 900lb. gorillia--is VERY attuned to this. You get 1, 2, or 5 complaints about usability, and they get VERY nasty, very quickly, with the publisher. That, then, is on the publisher.

About my selfish reasons:

Spoiler:

However--and this is where I'm going to be selfish--part of remaining on the Amazon list, as a professional conversion service, is that they fully expect that having passed all their tests, etc., you won't be stupid enough to create a book with a BAD reading experience, for the buyer. They take a very DIM VIEW of companies that produce books that engender complaints. We're the only company on that list in North America, or even on this side of the globe, and I want to bloody well stay on it. We worked VERY hard to be put on that list. It's not a damn directory listing.

I'd LOVE to come up with a better way. I would. But, unless I've missed a step, there's NO WAY to do that that then works on ALL the Amazon devices. So, do we build the page maps/pagelists, and wait for the devices to come TO it? Or...?

Oh, yes, of course--you can create FXL. But I still feel strongly that FXL is the WRONG solution for text-heavy pages. Lord, talk about a BAD reading experience! Hundreds of pages of pinch-zoom, pan/scan, etc.? NO THANKS.

Them thar are my thoughts, gang. Meera--I don't agree that a concordance is a reasonable substitution for a properly-curated index. I agree that it's better than NOTHING, of course, but...they're not the same.

Just my $.02,

Hitch

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Hitch

1. An instructor in a course that will have people with both e- and print books, wants to be able to say "this week's coursework is from page X to Y."
2. We have an index, and want to be able to go directly to that page.
3. Now I'm out of reasons.

The third reason (and it should really be the first) is that writers of Serious Books might want to quote you, and the citation really should work both on the print edition and the digital one. It's absurd and somewhat embarrassing to have to put "location 3543". (I usually just grit my teeth and cite by chapter, but that wouldn't work in À la recherche du temps perdu, would it?)

It's not just academic works that get quoted! A couple years ago I published a book that cited among other things The New Yorker, a 17th century troubador song (from the internet), and the Polish historical novel Potop ("The Deluge").

RPNs are wonderful. (If only they were easy.)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

The third reason (and it should really be the first) is that writers of Serious Books might want to quote you, and the citation really should work both on the print edition and the digital one. It's absurd and somewhat embarrassing to have to put "location 3543". (I usually just grit my teeth and cite by chapter, but that wouldn't work in À la recherche du temps perdu, would it?)

EXCELLENT point. Thanks.

It's not just academic works that get quoted! A couple years ago I published a book that cited among other things The New Yorker, a 17th century troubador song (from the internet), and the Polish historical novel Potop ("The Deluge").

RPNs are wonderful. (If only they were easy.)

Excellent point. It truly is, and I have no argument with it. Now, for a lighter moment:

Now I'll write that that guy (James Scott Bell) who cited me (unbelievable!!!) and tell him that I need him to use RPNs. MWAHAHAH. Seriously--he cited me from something ON THE WEB. I can see people trying to Strunk & White or CMOS that sucker. (Speaking of Lost Time...)


Hitch

[Bob Doyle]

Hi All,

Thanks very much for all the references to other posts which I will read carefully.

First, may I explain why do I need page numbers in the text of my reflowable eBooks?

It's because, as Tex2002ans explained, my multilevel index (topic entries and subentries) was curated carefully, by me as the author and by Heather Hedden, a board member of the American Society of Indexers, as editor. It cost over $1000 to prepare the index for my472-page textbook.

Now Hitch is rightly concerned about her "many-to-one problem," but an entry with multiple page numbers works beautifully in my two books, at least on some Kindles, notably the Paperwhite (which has a great back button)..

Consider the entry
Einstein, Albert
light quantum hypothesis of 361–364, 377

When I click on 377, it jumps to a "location" two pseudo-pages past the location with the in-text page number 377, as Hitch criticizes. But it goes precisely to the text with the Einstein marker I embedded in InDesign - just where it should go.

And, when I hit the back button in PPW, it jumps back to the "location" in the index with the Einstein entry, so I can now go to page 361 to learn more about Einstein's amazing hypothesis.

Once again, it goes precisely to the end of page 361 (we see page number 362 just below) and once again it is the right position in the text where I embedded the index marker.

And still once again, if I hit the back button, I am back with the subentries under Einstein, which is where I want to be to continue researching this topic.

Despite Tex2002ans other comments, I se nothing "distracting" about my page numbers (I agree the gif images were clunky in my 2011 book). With page numbers, students can be sure they read the assigned pages.

If students made up their own search terms, they would be most unlikely to find the right information, nor could I assign search terms that would zero in as perfectly as page numbers do from my carefully crafted index.

I think a hyperlinked index with page numbers in the text (this isn't a novel or comic book where numbers would be a nuisance) is an excellent thing in digital publishing.

Digital search is of course a terrific edition. My students say they use search when in a preliminary research mode, but they always read print material for deep study.

As the developer of the first desktop publishing software, MacPublisher, for the original 128K Mac in 1984, I am very happy with the Adobe InDesign CC that I use today. It produces very fine ePubs for iBooks and other standard eReaders that put Amazon Kindle to shame. But Amazons sells a lot of my print books and even more Kindle versions, so I am stuck with them.

I should note that Kovid Goyal's Calibre chokes on the EPUB3 FXL exported from InDesign. But a young EPUB developer from India (Pratibha Saini) has succeeded in producing a beautiful KF8/mobi fixed layout version of my latest book, Great Problems in Philosophy and Physics Solved?

Unfortunately, the page numbers in the index are not working as hyperlinks in Kindle Previewer 3, or when I sideload the file into my Fire HD8.

When I mouseover a number, the cursor changes in Previewer so the link is under there somewhere. But it just doesn't work. In the HD8, it doesn't even change the pointer to the hand as Previewer does.

Ken Jones' Circular FLO generates a somewhat similar file. it's fixed
layout looks good (though it's over twice the size of Pratibha's), but the links don't show a hand as I mouseover. The whole page always shows a hand cursor that goes nowhere in Previewer.

I am not recommending fixed layout for the smallest Kindles (as Hitch might think?), but my Fire HD8 screen looks to be about 95% of the page size in my 6"x9" textbook. The HD8 screen in 1/2" taller and 1/2" narrower that the iPad Mini, and my fixed layout book is quite readable in both without pinch and expand.

The FXL eBook is a precise replica of my textbook, which not only has page numbers, but also informative chapter titles and even chapter thumb tabs in the margins for easy physical navigation. Here is the Einstein reference page...



It seems clear that InDesign is putting something in their EPUB3 export that conflicts with Kindle's guidelines. My Indian developer claims it is in the CSS.

KDP recommends that a KF8 book start with an EPUB.

Do any of you know of an EPUB template whose OEBPF files could be unzipped and inspected for the right CSS, metadata, and any xhtml file headers that would satisfy the KDP conversion process?

I can see everything in my BBEdit and <oXygen/> editors. I just need to know what is required for KF8/AZW3 or whatever format KDP wants.

Thanks again for your help to textbook authors who want them to be as similar to our print works as possible.

Cheers,

Bob

[Bob Doyle]

Dear Notjohn,

Thanks so much for mentioning citations, which are essential for references in academic articles.

In my many thousands of pages website, informationphilosopher.com, I wrote a javascript to "Cite this page," but of course a web page is the equivalent of many print pages, so it's very rough. Maybe I should add sub-page numbers! Many scholars have used it and thanked me for an automatic citation. My site is widely used in schools. Google Analytics reports 700-800 unique new visitors a day.

By the way, the original material for my two books (so far) and maybe seven more books to come, is now on my website. I also post there free PDF versions of my first two books.
informationphilosopher.com/books

And you can read more about my revisionary history of Einstein and quantum mechanics here.
http://www.informationphilosopher.co...ists/einstein/

Coming back to real page numbers, my colleague Heather Hedden ran a subgroup of the American Society of Indexers on web indexing years ago. That has now been renamed digital publishing indexing, and she is preparing a report for the next annual meeting of the ASI on indexing a digital publication.

I hope to help her with research on the current state of the art. And we might submit an article to InDesign Magazine on the subject.

Frankly, all the standard EPUB readers do an excellent job (especially with InDesign index output) so Amazon is now a travesty that would be great to repair if we can find a template for an EPUB FXL sample file that converts both ToC and index with working hyperlinked page numbers.

For my purposes, Kindle reflowable is quite acceptable now - with my Indesign EPUB3 reflowable converted by Kovid Goyal's Calibre (although I have read many comments saying this does not work) and my unorthodox insertion of a paragraph with the page number at or near a page break.

Thanks again,

Bob

[Tex2002ans]

Page Numbers

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

Despite Tex2002ans other comments, I se nothing "distracting" about my page numbers (I agree the gif images were clunky in my 2011 book).

Anyone 87 who actually reads 88 ebooks finds 89 page 90 numbers 100 in the middle of text 101 distracting.

• Breaks search
  
  • What if I wanted to do a search but the sentence crosses pages?
• Don't work the way you want.
  
  • As Hitch mentioned. Trying to search for "24" will lead you to: "124", "224", "241", [...]. Plus all of the actual TEXT: "24 apples", "240 bananas", "in 1248 BC".
• Break copy/paste
  
  • What happens if a paragraph crosses the page boundary?
    
  • What happens when a single paragraph encompasses multiple pages? (Imagine a large figure that takes up 3/4 of a page + a large paragraph before/during/after it).
    
• Interfere with Text-to-Speech

And there are already ways to handle Page Numbers in EPUBs (mentioned previously). They are a part of the standards (so you can easily "jump to the correct page"), and they can appear non-intrusively on the device (out of the way in the device's Footer).

Not to mention Accessibility reasons (a screen reader will be able to use the standards-compliant way, not the hodgepodge way a single author decides to code their book).

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

[...] and my unorthodox insertion of a paragraph with the page number at or near a page break.

Just beware if Amazon will crack down on such a poor design. Page Numbers DO NOT belong in the flow of the text, and many readers will return the book as "Defective".

Amazon recalled a book over the Text-to-Speech issues when an author used MINUS SIGNS instead of hyphens. It caused a giant ruckus.

I 102 could see the same hammer be applied to 103 page numbers in text (as Amazon already does when enough 104 people return REALLY crappy OCRed books).

Indexes

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

But it goes precisely to the text with the Einstein marker I embedded in InDesign - just where it should go.

You would have to show specific code examples. Most Indexes are designed with page### ids and jump to approximate locations.

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

Now Hitch is rightly concerned about her "many-to-one problem," but an entry with multiple page numbers works beautifully in my two books, at least on some Kindles, notably the Paperwhite (which has a great back button).

Key word is SOME. SOME devices/readers don't have a back button. We have to design the ebooks taking many of the lowest common denominators into account.

In the case of a Footnote in the Text:

<p>This is some book text.<a href="#fn1" id="ft1">[1]</a></p>

Code at end of Chapter (or in separate Footnotes chapter):

<p><a href="#ft1" id="fn1">[1]</a> This is a footnote.</p>

The user WITH the back button can either click on the link to jump back OR use their back button.

The user WITHOUT the back button can still click and jump back.

In the case of One-to-One, this is great usability!

With the Index (Many) -> Page Number (One).

Code in Text:

This is a sentence that goes from page 99<a id="page100"></a> to page 100 where Einstein is mentioned.

And this is a sentence where Nobel is talked about.

Code in Index:

<p>Einstein, Albert, <a href="../Text/Chap01.xhtml#page100">100</a></p>

[...]

<p>Nobel, Alfred, <a href="../Text/Chap01.xhtml#page100">100</a></p>

You have a few problems (off the top of my head):

1. The link is ONLY ONE WAY.
   
   • Users without a back button are screwed.
2. MULTIPLE links point to page 100, but there is no good way to go from page 100 BACK to the X amount of Index references (Hitch's Many-to-One Problem).
3. See below.

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

I think a hyperlinked index with page numbers in the text (this isn't a novel or comic book where numbers would be a nuisance) is an excellent thing in digital publishing.

The problem here is again what Hitch brought up: FONT SIZES (font size can be much larger than in print) and DEVICE SIZES (most ereaders are not as large as pages in print books = less text per screen).

Here is just a quick example I grabbed:

Index: Period of production, 484

Ok, let me bust out my dusty ol' tome and hurt my hands dragging this thing to page 484!

PDF of Page:



Ebook (this is on my phone [much tinier than the physical page] with a slightly larger font size):



I followed the link to "Page 484", but I had to read through to the THIRD SCREEN before I found where he talked about "period of production".

As Hitch mentioned, depending on the variables, it could be ~1-5 Screens away from where I was dropped off!

Sure, SOME of the references might be exactly at the "top of the page", but the experience for a digital reader is very poor.

Side Note: The usability/helpfulness of these types of Linked Indexes in ebooks is debatable. Even many PUBLISHERS think that this is unhelpful, and completely strip the Print Indexes out of their ebooks.

In the "Kindle Page Numbers" topic, I came up with the terms "Format-Specific" + "Format-Neutral". Go read that topic for more details! I think the Indexes would be more useful if they were more Neutral.

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

That has now been renamed digital publishing indexing, and she is preparing a report for the next annual meeting of the ASI on indexing a digital publication.

Great. I hope the material can be released for anyone to read. From what I was able to gather in my previous Indexing research, a lot of those Indexing/Library journals + articles are locked behind prohibitively expensive paywalls.

Fixed Format

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

I should note that Kovid Goyal's Calibre chokes on the EPUB3 FXL exported from InDesign.

Calibre doesn't read Fixed Layout EPUBs, and most of us are not fans of the absurd format anyway (it is trying to be like PDF, but a thousand times worse!).

There isn't ONE flavor of Fixed Layout... there are TENS, and they all have their own quirks and are COMPLETELY incompatible with each other.

You have to design the HTML/CSS specifically for Store/Device X:

• iBooks
  
  • ipad: This is what InDesign mostly caters towards.
    
• B&N
  
  • Nook
    
  • Nook Color
    
  • [...]
    
• Kobo
  
  • [...]
• Amazon
  
  • Kindle
    
  • Kindle Fire
    
  • [...]
    

Each one has to be hand-designed/tweaked PLUS each individual page needs its own CSS file, and everything has to be pixel-placed.

Also, a simple thing like device size will completely change the design of the "Fixed Format" (let us say your initial book is 7"x10", but you have to squeeze that design onto a small 5" ereader.).

Fixed Format drastically shrinks your sellable market, because the book is only going to be readable on a very tiny subset of devices.

AND Fixed Format books throw out the entire PURPOSE and advantage of ebooks (reflowability, changing fonts, changing colors, reading on all different devices, being able to flip Landscape/Portrait, [...]).

On top of it all, they are a pain in the neck to navigate (as Hitch said, pinching/zooming, panning/scanning).

Hitch covers some of the Fixed Format stuff here:

http://www.booknook.biz/booknook-ser...d-fixed-format

We discussed the Pros/Cons of Fixed Format at length before. Just do a search on MobileRead and you will come across those topics.

PDFs are the better "Fixed Format" experience AND can be read on more infinitely more devices. (Although trying to read a book-sized PDF on a phone, or a PDF on a lower powered ereader... absolute crap.)

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

It seems clear that InDesign is putting something in their EPUB3 export that conflicts with Kindle's guidelines. My Indian developer claims it is in the CSS.

InDesign creates an ABSOLUTE FUCKING ABOMINATION of code in their Fixed Format EPUBs. It isn't just the HTML/CSS.

(Forgive the language, but there is just no other words for the crap that comes out of it.)

Here is one sentence out of the latest conversion from InDesign I worked on:



This is what a CLEAN Fixed Layout code would look like (and a properly done Fixed Layout Book [like Hitch's company would design]):

<p class="par4">Fortunately, in recent years, writers and sociologists like Goodman <br/>and Edgar Z. Friedenberg have turned a caustic light on our system of <br/>compulsory schooling; for the first time in many decades, this mischie-<br/>vous system is coming under careful and critical scrutiny.</p>

This is the same sentence in InDesign's Fixed Format EPUB3:

Spoiler:

tunately, </span><span id="_idTextSpan605" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:1496.88 px;">in </span><span id="_idTextSpan606" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:1755.97 px;letter-spacing:-0.72px;">recent </span><span id="_idTextSpan607" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:2382.23 px;letter-spacing:-0.44px;">years, </span><span id="_idTextSpan608" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:2965.6p x;letter-spacing:-0.38px;">writers </span><span id="_idTextSpan609" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:3660.95 px;letter-spacing:-0.6px;">and </span><span id="_idTextSpan610" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:4072.06 px;letter-spacing:0.15px;">sociologists </span><span id="_idTextSpan611" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:5177.03 px;letter-spacing:-0.09px;">like </span><span id="_idTextSpan612" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8006.4px;left:5575.16 px;letter-spacing:0.6px;">Goodman </span><span id="_idTextSpan613" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:0px;let ter-spacing:-0.6px;">and </span><span id="_idTextSpan614" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:409.53p x;letter-spacing:0px;">Edgar </span><span id="_idTextSpan615" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:1012.64 px;">Z. </span><span id="_idTextSpan616" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:1273.67 px;letter-spacing:-0.22px;">Friedenberg </span><span id="_idTextSpan617" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:2427px; letter-spacing:-1.06px;">have </span><span id="_idTextSpan618" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:2909.78 px;letter-spacing:-0.09px;">turned </span><span id="_idTextSpan619" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:3586.38 px;">a </span><span id="_idTextSpan620" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:3760.51 px;letter-spacing:-0.49px;">caustic </span><span id="_idTextSpan621" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:4444.36 px;letter-spacing:-0.33px;">light </span><span id="_idTextSpan622" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:4926.04 px;letter-spacing:-0.81px;">on </span><span id="_idTextSpan623" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:5233.93 px;letter-spacing:-0.55px;">our </span><span id="_idTextSpan624" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:5621.68 px;letter-spacing:-0.38px;">system </span><span id="_idTextSpan625" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8270.4px;left:6302.9p x;letter-spacing:-0.81px;">of </span><span id="_idTextSpan626" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8534.4px;left:0px;let ter-spacing:-0.16px;">compulsory </span><span id="_idTextSpan627" class="CharOverride-2" style="position:absolute;top:8534.4px;left:1124.87 px;letter-spacing:-0.08px;">schooling; 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they wrap a span around EVERY... STINKING... WORD... and absolutely position it with pixels + letter-spacing.

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

Frankly, all the standard EPUB readers do an excellent job (especially with InDesign index output) so Amazon is now a travesty that would be great to repair if we can find a template for an EPUB FXL sample file that converts both ToC and index with working hyperlinked page numbers.

There is a reason why companies like Hitch's charge so much for Fixed Layout. Each one pretty much has to be designed over from scratch. And there is so many little quirks and oddities for each device that you have to take into account.

Misc.

Originally Posted by Bob Doyle

[...] but of course a web page is the equivalent of many print pages, so it's very rough. Maybe I should add sub-page numbers!

Citing Websites + Digital Books directly is perfectly legitimate/valid.

Leave page numbers in the dust bin of history.

When you properly cite Tex2002ans from MobileRead in your articles... I don't want to see any "As the illustrious Tex2002ans stated on MobileRead on Page 3 when set to 10 posts per page, in the topic 'Real Page Numbers for Reflowable Kindles' [...]."

Thanks again for your help to textbook authors who want them to be as similar to our print works as possible.

The ebook should be SIMILAR in spirit... but trying to force the crappy Physical into a Digital experience is the absolutely wrong method.

[Hitch]

Tex:

Thank you, for your as-always detailed and incisive addition to the discussion. Pardon me whilst I go off a bit:

I think that something is getting lost, in this conversation. Tex brought it up, twice, but as he is spared the indignities of dealing with fixed-layout and retailers, he's not quite as attuned to it as I.

Yes, you CAN build a fixed-layout "mobi" file, from a fixed-layout ePUB file. Voila!

EXCEPT, a) it doesn't work correctly on all devices in the Kindleverse, and, b) that will NOT PASS the intake inspection at the KDP, because quite bluntly, it isn't even remotely close to the coding that Amazon mandates, for their fixed-layout books.

(n.b.: I tested the MOBI that the young lady from Fiverr or wherever made. It did not function, at all, on my Fire device, period. The basic Fire I tested it on is First-Gen. I did not then test it on the others, because...what's the point? The Fire is the primary market for Fixed-layout.)

PERIOD. I am not saying, Bob, that someone can't find some way, using INDD or INDD-->ePUB--->MOBI (via Calibre--which is boggling), that wouldn't create a file that might somewhat function on an Android Fire device. Of course.

And, with a certain amount of effort, sewing, and tolerance to extreme pain, I might dress up my Maine Coon as an English Bulldog, and fool the nosy neighbor down the street. But, kids, that does not an English Bulldog make, firstly, and secondly, I'm pretty sure that the AKC wouldn't be fooled into listing Mr. Zep as an English Bulldog. Would they?


Now, obviously, in my fanciful scenario, Amazon = AKC.

There's a guy--he's referenced around here someplace--who hangs out in Nook territory, apparently a formatting expert of some kind, who persists in telling people that you CAN make a fixed-layout book for Nook. (There's a thread around here someplace.) YES, you can make a fixed-layout ePUB that will work on a Nook Device--somewhat.

What you CANNOT do, however, is make on that you can BLOODY SELL ON A NOOK DEVICE.

This entire conversation is starting to remind me of Jeff Goldblum's wonderful line, crafted by Crichton, in Jurassic Park. To paraphrase:

"your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

And that's relevant here. Why? Because while the book can be made, that doesn't mean that it can be SOLD. To me, given my line of work, that matters. Do we, at my wee shop, conduct experiments? Do I have media queries that we play with, that look like a map of Frodo's trek across Middle Earth? I do, bygod. However, 99% of my time is doing one thing: working on creating books that CAN. BE. SOLD.

Why? Because publishing is a bloody business. It's not a think-tank. (Lord, if there was ever any magical thinking in that vein, the past 6 years have most surely disabused even the most far-out magical thinker of any such notion.)

You, Bob, have already had your TOC revised AND moved to the rear of the book, being supplanted by Amazon's own efforts, because you went absolutely, positively, directly against their Publisher's Formatting Guidelines which expressly state:

Do not use page numbers in the TOC. Kindle books do not always map directly to page numbers in physical editions of the book. Kindle Publishing Guidelines, v. 2015-4-`, sec.5, p.18. (Underscore emphasis added).

You are thus already afoul of the Zon.

Unless the solution is something aside from the visible page numbers, I don't see Amazon biting on this. Not as an acceptable, to-be-sold book. Tex has listed all the various issues. Like your insistance that your index works--on ONE device. I promise you, it wouldn't work on all. That's why companies like mine, by and large, leave the index/indices in our eBooks, exactly as they existed in print, and we tell the readers to use the Search function, while being guided by the curation of the Index. We are thousands of books into this, and so far--nary a complaint about that.

But I can tell you without missing a beat that I've heard nearly endless complaints about how linked indices work--or don't. People do NOT like clicking, clicking, clicking to find "dog" on "page 23," which is 5 screens away from where they jumped. You didn't create your index like an index is created; you individually linked each word or sentence or paragraph to a specific page number in the index. That's not how 99.99% of all indices are created. Not at all. So, your solution, of linking to a specific WORD, isn't going to work for the business.

Moreover, how crisply does that "back" button methodology work, if the linked entry is 4,5, 6 pages of content, that the reader jumps to, consumes, page-flipping as she goes? I would promise you that the "back" button isn't going to work as advertised in that scenario.

So, sorry, gang. Didn't mean to go off on a tear. The bottom line is:

If you create a "fixed layout mobi" from a fixed-layout ePUB, made with InDesign, that eBook does NOT, and will not, MEET THE AMAZON QUALITY GUIDELINES. It is NOT formatted CORRECTLY. It will NOT be sold, by Amazon, at least, not for long before they remove it from sale and require you to fix it. It doesn't matter if the book did work. It doesn't, which is a whole other issue--but even if it did, you can't get there from here. (n.b.: and the book failed, utterly, to take advantage of the most fundamental features of fixed-layout--the RM!!!).

As far as the reflowable book, Bob, I've provided feedback both here and privately. I do not feel that the typed page number solution is elegant. I just don't.

I mean...how is that new? There's nothing revolutionary about that. That's what everybody was trying 6-7 years ago. If it works so well, then, aren't you asking yourself why absolutely none of the retailers have adopted that? Or why the ePUB standards aren't adopting that? I mean, it's tedium to do it that way, but it's not brain surgery. If that solution works so well, then why haven't all the retailers, etc., simply incorporated that into their guidelines and standards?

So, in closing, no ePUB template will help you. That's not how you get there from here. You know how we make eBooks, at my shop? Fixed-layout eBooks in MOBI format?

We code them by hand. Period. If that's the format you want, then you have to download Amazon's samples, the Guidelines, and do it up in good old HTML and CSS.

Bob said:

I am not recommending fixed layout for the smallest Kindles (as Hitch might think?),

...the problem, Bob, is that you don't get to limit what device buys it. That's Amazon's wheelhouse. Once you put FXL up there--one made in accordance with the Amazon standards, that is--then anyone with one of the allowed devices or readers can buy it. Period.

BTW--fire the Indian "developer." CSS? Geeze, lady, try reading the damn manual.

There's no magic way to make a FXL MOBI from a FXL ePUB. I don't mean to sound terse or didactic, but I kind of feel like I'm saying the same things over and over, to no avail. Perhaps other folks' voices will be clearer.

Done now.

Spoiler:

Been in the office until 1-2:30 in the morning every night for the past week, and my cranky meter is pinging VERY LOUDLY. GRUMPY. Mea culpa if I'm more acerbic than usual.

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I think that something is getting lost, in this conversation. Tex brought it up, twice, but as he is spared the indignities of dealing with fixed-layout and retailers, he's not quite as attuned to it as I.

Heh. Yeah, I don't know much about the selly selly, I just know about the converty converty!

But I really don't touch designing Fixed Layout books with a ten-foot pole, I would shift all that pain and suffering onto you!

Does Kobo have their own brand of Fixed Layout EPUB? Is that actually sellable there or is it like B&N's mythical one? Or am I just going crazy again? Is this another case of only the Big Publishers get to do it and no one else?

Edit: I just went looking up some Kobo Fixed Layout Info and stumbled across this:

Kobo Advises Against Overuse of Fixed Layout

Content creators are advised against producing Fixed Layout ePubs solely for the purpose of reproducing a print layout. Text cannot be resized by users while reading Fixed Layout content and as a result small text can only be read by zooming in. This can greatly diminish the reading experience particularly on eInk devices, smartphones and Desktop applications. Fixed Layout serves comics, children's books and other categories well but is not an ideal format for text heavy content that could be displayed as reflowable content. Furthermore Fixed Layout ePubs require more in depth testing prior to distribution to ensure that they display correctly across multiple reading platforms.

Originally Posted by Hitch

I don't mean to sound terse or didactic, but I kind of feel like I'm saying the same things over and over, to no avail. Perhaps other folks' voices will be clearer.

Done now.

Me too. Bed time now! ... I should have just continued referencing the previous topic. I knew it was a bad idea getting me all riled up about "Real Page Numbers" again...

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Heh. Yeah, I don't know much about the selly selly, I just know about the converty converty!

But I really don't touch designing Fixed Layout books with a ten-foot pole, I would shift all that pain and suffering onto you!

Does Kobo have their own brand of Fixed Layout EPUB? Is that actually sellable there or is it like B&N's mythical one? Or am I just going crazy again? Is this another case of only the Big Publishers get to do it and no one else?

Edit: I just went looking up some Kobo Fixed Layout Info and stumbled across this:


Me too. Bed time now! ... I should have just continued referencing the previous topic. I knew it was a bad idea getting me all riled up about "Real Page Numbers" again...

Geeezee...it's 2:46 a.m., and I'm still doing this crap.

To answer your question(s);

1. There IS a real fxl format for B&N; it's essentially iBA (iBooksAuthor) wrapped up in a B&N wrapper, and it is used ONLY for books to be made and sold on the NookKids' platform. Not only do the publishers have to have a regular publishing contract with B&N (not a self-pubbing one, mind you), but you can't even OBTAIN the NookKids' software until you prove that you're competent to make the books. Which--wait for it--you do by providing them with sample NookKids' books that you've aleady made. Yes: you read that correctly.
2. IBooks has FXL for:
3. ePUB2 and
4. ePUB3.
5. Kobobooks will publish and sell ePUB3s made for iBooks. So, yes, that exists, but as you note--they are quite dissuasive about the idea, generally.
6. Amazon has their own, completely unique (to be redundant) set of criteria and standards for their FXL eBooks. Those are:
7. Kids' books, which can be handmade, like my shop does, or by using Kindle Kids' Book Creator;
8. Comic books (really only viable with the Kindle Comic Creator);
9. and Kindle Textbooks, which are the type of FXL that can zoom--but the font sizes cannot be changed, etc. This is the format to which I was referring in my various comments in this thred. This format has a number of good uses, but, IMHO, not on text-heavy pages. This is basically a PDF wrapped in a wrapper that functions (somewhat) in the MOBI environs.

Now: off to bed, dammit!

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

RPNs

Do you know that RPN does not stand for what you think it does but in fact means Reverse Polish Notation? See older HP calculators for RPN.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, you CAN build a fixed-layout "mobi" file, from a fixed-layout ePUB file. Voila!

No you can't build a fixed layout Mobi file from any source. You can build a fixed layout KF8.

[Doitsu]

@Hitch: IMHO, the best format for Bob's purposes would be the Kindle Print Replica textbook format, i.e., an Amazon DRM-wrapped PDF file.

However, AFAIK, you can't publish Kindle Print Replica books via Amazon KDP. (AFAIK, Amazon CreateSpace will accept .pdf files, but only for print-on-demand books.)

Have you ever prepared a Kindle Print Replica textbook for a "well-known educational publisher" or have you ever heard of someone who managed to sell a CreateSpace print-on-demand book as a Kindle Print Replica textbook?