Yet Another Thread on Page Numbers (when will it stop?)

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I think that to say it's "totally inaccurate" is putting it a little strongly. It seems to routinely have an error of about a dozen pages, but that's an absolute error, not a relative one. eg if you jump, say, 80% of the way through a book, you'll end up within about a dozen pages of the "true" 80% point. That's good enough for many purposes.

How do you know that. I think you are guessing. I now tested to page forward 100 pages from the beginning and then jump 100 pages. The error was 33 pages. Paging forward 50 pages gave an error of 15 pages. This does not seem to be an absolute error to me.

So how did you do the experiments that let you claim what you claimed?

But as I have said before this is pretty uninteresting if you want to know how long a text is and how much you have read of it. It is easy to implement this functionality. You only have to count characters and the make sure you only count displayed characters if you have an html file but that is not hard. I assume that is how the Kindle solve these problems.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

How do you know that. I think you are guessing. I now tested to page forward 100 pages from the beginning and then jump 100 pages. The error was 33 pages. Paging forward 50 pages gave an error of 15 pages. This does not seem to be an absolute error to me.

So how did you do the experiments that let you claim what you claimed?

By paging to particular points in the book and then jumping to those same points, and comparing the page number. I found that the error seems to be relatively constant, rather than increasing with how far through the book you are.

EDIT: I must correct myself.

For NON-illustrated books, the error appears to be reasonably constant. For ILLUSTRATED books, it does indeed increase as you go through the book!

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

By paging to particular points in the book and then jumping to those same points, and comparing the page number. I found that the error seems to be relatively constant, rather than increasing with how far through the book you are.

EDIT: I must correct myself.

For NON-illustrated books, the error appears to be reasonably constant. For ILLUSTRATED books, it does indeed increase as you go through the book!

My test case was without illustration and the error on the Cybook doubled when I doubled the paging.

An illustration would only introduce an error of one page I think.

If you think about how they can have implemented it there is no reason for the error to be absolute.

[brecklundin]

Wow what a cool thread it went from ergonomics and feel to page numbers...cool thread jack that even I would be proud of!

BTw, about page numbering in Mobipocket format books having the same "issues' on each device...well, no-duh, it's gonna essentially be the same core code with only the hooks to the OS and maybe the UI being different.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by brecklundin

What, about page numbering in Mobipocket format books having the same "issues' on each device...well, no-duh, it's gonna essentially be the same core code with only the hooks to the OS and maybe the UI being different.

Yes, we all realise this. What point are you trying to make?