A very simple thing amazon could do

[Pjama]

It occurred to me as I was reading on the beautiful display of my new Oasis 3 that there is one very simple thing Amazon could do to make the display look more like a book.

Have an option to display the page number alone, in the middle of the footer!

This would look wonderful, and I would appreciate the option to see the page number without the percentage.

Note that I am not advocating removal of the percentage from all the reading progress footers, but providing an option for centered page number without this would be great.

[koboy]

Originally Posted by Pjama

It occurred to me as I was reading on the beautiful display of my new Oasis 3 that there is one very simple thing Amazon could do to make the display look more like a book.

Have an option to display the page number alone, in the middle of the footer!

This would look wonderful, and I would appreciate the option to see the page number without the percentage.

Note that I am not advocating removal of the percentage from all the reading progress footers, but providing an option for centered page number without this would be great.

good idea let's hope they do it. another simple thing Amazon could do is add pages left in chapter into the firmware, i know it as time left in chapter but not pages. i much prefer pages left in chapter it's the main reason why i use my Kobo all of the time while the Kindle lays idle.


best wishes koboy

[Pyjam]

No hope.
Remember that Amazon doesn't like pages and prefers their stupid "locations".

[stumped]

because pages has no well defined meaning, if by pages left you mean screens left, that will change whenever you change font size. If you define page so that it doe not correlate to screen, then there are complaints that page is not working properly / is stuck/ is skipping... its not a winnable challenge

Location and percentage are reliable indicators with fixed meanings. time left is fairly reliable if you are not a page flipper and give the algorithm time to study you

[koboy]

Originally Posted by stumped

because pages has no well defined meaning, if by pages left you mean screens left, that will change whenever you change font size. If you define page so that it doe not correlate to screen, then there are complaints that page is not working properly / is stuck/ is skipping... its not a winnable challenge

Location and percentage are reliable indicators with fixed meanings. time left is fairly reliable if you are not a page flipper and give the algorithm time to study you

indeed i do mean pages/screens left in chapter. obviously if you change font size it changes how many pages/screens are left, but that's not problem or a good enough reason not to have the option imho. it certainly gets my vote hence why i use it always.

best wishes koboy

[stumped]

moon reader (epub) app does show pages in chapter, and reaclulates on the fly if you change a setting, but does not show pages left in book, probably because it only holds the current chapter in ram, and thus could not easily re-compute it.

I convert most of my amazon books to epub and settle for that.

a kindle - with its puny cpu, would struggle to recalculate the pages left in some war and peace length tome in an acceptable number of minutes ( and it probably would be minutes, not seconds)

other apps I have seen with page counts use the adobe definition of page as a set number of character, which leads to the problems previously mentioned

[koboy]

Originally Posted by stumped

moon reader (epub) app does show pages in chapter, and reaclulates on the fly if you change a setting, but does not show pages left in book, probably because it only holds the current chapter in ram, and thus could not easily re-compute it.

I convert most of my amazon books to epub and settle for that.

a kindle - with its puny cpu, would struggle to recalculate the pages left in some war and peace length tome in an acceptable number of minutes ( and it probably would be minutes, not seconds)

other apps I have seen with page counts use the adobe definition of page as a set number of character, which leads to the problems previously mentioned

my Kobo does it fine no matter how big the chapter is and it only takes a matter of seconds certainly not minutes. i'm using the kepub format because it's not an option in epub. i have no interest installing 3rd party apps etc i like to use the stock firmware only.

when i got my Kindle Basic (8th generation) i was very surprised and disappointed that the pages/screens in chapter wasn't a reading setting/option in the firmware. which is why like i said in my first post the Kindle Basic remains inside it's closed cover.

the way i see it is if the customer doesn't get what they want then they won't be a customer for very long.

as i often like to add each to their own of course.

best wishes koboy

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by stumped

moon reader (epub) app does show pages in chapter, and reaclulates on the fly if you change a setting, but does not show pages left in book, probably because it only holds the current chapter in ram, and thus could not easily re-compute it.

a kindle - with its puny cpu, would struggle to recalculate the pages left in some war and peace length tome in an acceptable number of minutes ( and it probably would be minutes, not seconds)

I use KOReader and no, it does not take minutes to recompute page count on a 600K word EPUB.

It takes KOReader ~30s to open the EPUB and cache render info (in storage) which includes total page count. After that, page turns are practically instantaneous (at least as fast as they can be on e-ink). I've set the status bar on mine to display Current Page / Total # of Pages so easy enough to subtract (and quite trivial for the Kindle's puny CPU to calculate although I don't know if Page Left in Book is an option to show in KOReader's status bar). Yes, the page count changes when you change font size and unfortunately, that takes 30s as well since it re-renders the entire book all at once at the new font size.

Still, 30s probably feels like forever just for changing font size so I expect the Kindle native renderer just renders on a chunk by chunk basis.

[stumped]

Actually, kobo gets confused with book page counts if there is not one html file per chapter, but if you fix that issue then it is OK. But if a large chapter is split into two files, then the page references in toc can be one chapter offset. Unless they fixed it. My kobo is quite old.

30 second is OK if it's a background task and does not interfere with reading, page turning, but what size book is that. What happens with an omnibus edition with thousands of pages?

[koboy]

Originally Posted by stumped

Actually, kobo gets confused with book page counts if there is not one html file per chapter, but if you fix that issue then it is OK. But if a large chapter is split into two files, then the page references in toc can be one chapter offset. Unless they fixed it. My kobo is quite old.

30 second is OK if it's a background task and does not interfere with reading, page turning, but what size book is that. What happens with an omnibus edition with thousands of pages?

like i mentioned all my kepub books on my Kobo work 100% when using pages/screens left in chapter and that includes some hefty delphi classics complete works 100MB size kepub one is 150MB it still works perfectly.

Amazon i'm pretty sure could quite easily add pages/screens left in chapter if they wanted to, only they know why they haven't/don't want to do so. personally i prefer it because if i can see how many pages/screen turns are left until the next chapter it feels/seems more like i'm reading a paper/real book.

best wishes koboy

[NiLuJe]

I'll detail the "instantaneous" @ilovejedd mentioned:

For a random prose page, tightly fitted (i.e., very, very, very narrow margins and line spaces), in which I can fit 37 lines of text on a Forma screen, with Bookerly, rendered unhinted (hello, 300dpi ;p), but w/ ligatures, it takes CRe around 50ms to render said page, and KOReader ~3ms to blit it.
That's for a KePub (i.e., heavier DOM because of the extra Kobo spans).

All in all, less than 100ms. (Things get wonkier if you swap to a non-standard orientation, because we don't support hardware rotation for legacy reasons. Expect blitting to jump to ~100ms at worst, IIRC).

That's a crapload faster than both Kobo's renderers. That's also slightly faster than any of Kindle's three or four renderers.

The only trade-off is indeed the heavier cost at opening/re-rendering time (i.e., the toilet paper roll approach CRe takes vs. a chunked approach).

Note that the crappy ePub specification itself makes a chunked approach much more annoying to implement right. (i.e., there's a reason besides DRM Amazon never ever will touch ePub with a ten-foot pole: performance).

[stumped]

ps. if its linear, then 30 secs for a 500 page novel would mean 300 secs ( 5 minutes) for a ~5000 page omnibus or a war and peace. which is why I asserted minutes not seconds a few posts back.

I think the Libby app from overdrive - for library books - does a recompute on the fly of pages, but typically that's running on an android device with more cpu power than an e-ink reader

I agree that amazon could do pages left in chapter quite easily, as a chapter will have been pre-loaded into ROM

whether they should do it is a different debate. it would maybe be interesting to check if there's any demand for it in amazon's own forums

and there is the odd annoying author who does not believe in chapters, so the book comes as one long scroll. e.g. Wilbur Smith , in some of his books; Cormac McArthy, who does not believe in punctuation either ; Jack Kerouac, ( pre being "remastered" for modern readers... )

[NiLuJe]

@stumped: There's a discussion thread about an edge-case scenario in the KOReader forum, if you want some hard numbers across different platforms for truly horrendously complex stuff (generally, Bibles). (TL;DR: Not linear. For the usual prose novel, 30s is already a worst-case scenario in my experience).

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by Pjama

It occurred to me as I was reading on the beautiful display of my new Oasis 3 that there is one very simple thing Amazon could do to make the display look more like a book.

Have an option to display the page number alone, in the middle of the footer!

This would look wonderful, and I would appreciate the option to see the page number without the percentage.

Note that I am not advocating removal of the percentage from all the reading progress footers, but providing an option for centered page number without this would be great.

I prefer any page numbers off to the side, so you know there are a lot of people just like me. Amazon just has to throw their hands in the air and decide, I guess.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by stumped

ps. if its linear, then 30 secs for a 500 page novel would mean 300 secs ( 5 minutes) for a ~5000 page omnibus or a war and peace. which is why I asserted minutes not seconds a few posts back.

Note, that ~30 seconds was for a 600,000 word count EPUB (was actually more like 23-24 seconds for 524,241?). Afaik, that's close to the word count of War and Peace.