[GUI Plugin] Count Pages

[kiwidude]

@Kogs - now you have really confused me .

So you are saying that you download an ePub from KoboBooks, and when you open it on your Kobo it displays a page count of X. And X is based around how many screen turns that book will take (based around some "regular" font size setting on the device)? And if you increase your font size, that number X stays the same, it just takes more "turns" per "page"?

Then if you instead download an Amazon mobi file to calibre, convert to ePub and put that book on your device... you would instead get a page count of Y rather than X?

So where does the Count Pages plugin come into this? And where is the Kobo getting its page count from? To me page count can only come from one of:
(1) estimating based on the content of the ePub (which should give you similar counts no matter where the ePub came from)
(2) some special piece of metadata inserted into the ePub (which you should be able to find if that was the case).
(3) some sort of external metadata file (like the APNX file the Kindle uses).

But in cases 2 & 3, what does it do for books not from the KoboBooks store? Does it "fallback" to (1)?

Confused

[Zetmolm]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@Zetmolm - of course, it was you that requested fb2 and Vaessa that requested txt... I just looked back at what I wrote about this previously here. It seems I had ideas back then which I subsequently forgot about

I can't see a major downside to what I proposed (other than it being possibly slightly slower for mobi only users) as it looks similar to what I just stated above. Basically completely drop using the APNX algorithm for mobi books. Instead always convert to ePub format (if not already ePub) and use my existing algorithm for that. Which format it chooses to convert to ePub comes from your preferred input format order. So it should additionally cope with fb2, txt, lit or whatever - heck even pdf if you were silly enough to try it and that was your only or preferred format (we all know how slow and badly pdf -> epub conversions work out).

I shall take a look hopefully this weekend.

Well, it is reassuring that even a person who gives us all these great plugins is not superhuman after all and is subject to forgetting things once in a while, like all of us

I do have books in other formats than just epub, mobi and fb2 (but no PDF of course ), so the solution you suggest would work very well for me. I'm looking forward to what you'll come up with.

[kiwidude]

Ha ha, no definitely not superhuman, especially when it comes to remembering things nowadays. That is why I write such verbose posts - so I can later tell myself again what my thoughts were by re-reading them

[KoGs]

Ok let's use an actual situation.

I buy a book from kobobooks and upload it onto my kobo. I open it up and it says 1 / 200. The 200 is based on my font size. And in this case it would require 200 screens to get to the end of the book. If I increase the font size, the page count becomes 1/250 and if I make the font size smaller it becomes 1/150. And still 1 screen will be considered 1 page.

If I upload a mobi converted book into my kobo the page count will still say 1/200 (not quite sure if it's exactly the same since like I said, I can't upload a mobi and a kobo book). Regardless of whether I change font size, the pages will still show 1/200. The only thing that will change by increasing or decreasing font size will be the number of screens required before it changes to 2/200.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by KoGs

Ok let's use an actual situation.

I buy a book from kobobooks and upload it onto my kobo. I open it up and it says 1 / 200. The 200 is based on my font size. And in this case it would require 200 screens to get to the end of the book. If I increase the font size, the page count becomes 1/250 and if I make the font size smaller it becomes 1/150. And still 1 screen will be considered 1 page.

If I upload a mobi converted book into my kobo the page count will still say 1/200 (not quite sure if it's exactly the same since like I said, I can't upload a mobi and a kobo book). Regardless of whether I change font size, the pages will still show 1/200. The only thing that will change by increasing or decreasing font size will be the number of screens required before it changes to 2/200.

I just want to check/clarify this based on experiments with my Kobo Touch.

Firstly, at the bottom of the screen when reading a book is "PG x of y". What this means depends on the type of book.

If I load an ePub, the KT calculates a page count and this is "y". If I change the the font size, this does not change. So, I can press the right side of the screen several times before the page number, "x", changes. Also, for an ePub, the KT has an option to put the page number in the right-hand margin. This shows where the new page starts and can appear part way down the screen. It can be one number higher than the page number at the bottom of the screen. I am sure that I have seen somewhere that the KT uses a fixed number of characters to define a page. Of course, I can't find this right now. The number 1000 comes to mind, but that might be from this plugin. As far as I can tell, the source of the epub (bought, free or converted via Calibre) doesn't matter. I don't have any with DRM to test.

For a kepub bought from the Kobo shop, the page numbering works differently. The numbers at the bottom of the page look the same, but mean something different. In this case, the "y" is the number of pages in the current chapter or section. The "x" is the page within this. To make it more confusing, if I change the font size, the number of pages in the section is recalculated and the page numbers reflect page turns on the device.

On the KT, as well as the font size, I can also change the margins and line spacing. This has a similar affect as changing the font size for the two basic book types.

The KT can also show mobi files directly, but I don't have one loaded at the moment to test.

The above agrees with KoGs description. I wasn't sure exactly which Kobo he has so I don't know if his works exactly the same, but it sounds like it does.

[KoGs]

I just have the basic 1st edition Kobo

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by KoGs

I buy a book from kobobooks and upload it onto my kobo. I open it up and it says 1 / 200. The 200 is based on my font size. And in this case it would require 200 screens to get to the end of the book. If I increase the font size, the page count becomes 1/250 and if I make the font size smaller it becomes 1/150. And still 1 screen will be considered 1 page.

The last ereader to use this number system was LRF or LRX formats on Sony ereaders.

Originally Posted by KoGs

If I upload a mobi converted book into my kobo the page count will still say 1/200 (not quite sure if it's exactly the same since like I said, I can't upload a mobi and a kobo book). Regardless of whether I change font size, the pages will still show 1/200. The only thing that will change by increasing or decreasing font size will be the number of screens required before it changes to 2/200.

As davidfor explained normal epubs are numbered as you describe above (fixed number of pages) on every ePub ereader. Kepubs (Kobo ePubs) are apparently numbered via screen pages on Kobo devices.

Regardless, this plugin will never accommodate the number of pages based on font size and screens required to complete the book.

[kiwidude]

Interesting, not being a Kobo owner had never heard of a kepub. Thanks for the information.

However I still fail to see where any of this has any real relevance to this plugin. The behaviour described of different page numbering on the Kobo between an epub resulting from a calibre conversion vs a Kobo store sourced "kepub" has been well explained, they are different formats that the Kobo has a differing feature sets available for. But as this plugin from a device perspective only has relevance to Kindle owners with mobi format books it is completely unrelated.

So the only association of any kind I can think of related to this whole Kobo discussion is a user wanting to see a page count in their calibre library that is similar to what they will see on their Kobo. But as has just been explained, a Kobo user already gets differing page counts depending on whether it is an epub or a kepub. And no-one seems to have an idea how exactly either is computed . If you want a page count based on 1000 characters (ADE style), you already have the ability to choose that in the algorithms for ePub.

So I don't see anywhere to go with this as a possible enhancement, sorry!

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Interesting, not being a Kobo owner had never heard of a kepub. Thanks for the information.

However I still fail to see where any of this has any real relevance to this plugin. The behaviour described of different page numbering on the Kobo between an epub resulting from a calibre conversion vs a Kobo store sourced "kepub" has been well explained, they are different formats that the Kobo has a differing feature sets available for. But as this plugin from a device perspective only has relevance to Kindle owners with mobi format books it is completely unrelated.

So the only association of any kind I can think of related to this whole Kobo discussion is a user wanting to see a page count in their calibre library that is similar to what they will see on their Kobo. But as has just been explained, a Kobo user already gets differing page counts depending on whether it is an epub or a kepub. And no-one seems to have an idea how exactly either is computed . If you want a page count based on 1000 characters (ADE style), you already have the ability to choose that in the algorithms for ePub.

I had to go back through the discussion to what started it. It looks like a "why don't the page counts in different places agree" question. And we have now beaten this to death

So I don't see anywhere to go with this as a possible enhancement, sorry!

Well, you could make the number of characters per page configurable. But, that would just be an me poking a Kiwi

[kiwidude]

@davidfor - yep it is pretty much "but there's a hole in my bucket..."

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Support count page/word estimates for any book format by converting to ePub, using preferred input format order

This should address a number of the issues that have been raised over time in this thread. Specifically:

• Problems with mobi page count estimates being extremely poor for books using <blockquote> or <div> are now bypassed by not calling the calibre code which has the issue. Note that if you have a Kindle and not done so already from v1.3.0 of this plugin you should customize your Kindle plugin to pull the data from your page custom column (or else the apnx files on the device will still have the wrong count).
• Users wanting a page count from formats other than epub/mobi can now do so without having to do and store a conversion themselves. So if it is txt or fb2 files that you want a page/word count from, the plugin will take care of it. The format must be convertible to ePub though - for instance if you only have a doc format you still won't be able to get a page count from it directly without converting it to another format outside of calibre first.

Enjoy...

[Zetmolm]

Thanks, kiwidude. That's exactly what I hoped for!

[Nyssa]

After the last 2 updates I've started seeing the following error message for the last 4 out of 5 books I've added.

"Could not scan 1 of 1 books because no convertible source format was found or book has no Goodreads ID "

My books are all mobi format which I then convert to epub. I do use the "Goodreads" meta data plugin, but not the "Goodreads Sync" plugin.

[kiwidude]

@Nyssa - click on the show details box and post the contents of that.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@Nyssa - click on the show details box and post the contents of that.

"(No goodreads id)"