The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

When others want to know the path to their eBooks in their calibre library when they should not know that and really have no need to know that.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I'm not sure what's more frustrating: the "I put my library on an NAS/Dropbox/GDrive and now I'm having issues" posts, or the "how do I change my Calibre library structure?" posts.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And on top of that there is the "calibre has changed the filename".

They don't get that caliber's library is meant to be left alone.

But it's my library and I should have total control over the structure! When pointed to forking calibre as a fix to their issue, somehow, it dampens their enthusiasm.

Umm... to paraphrase one poster, it's calibre not caliber so people won't be able to find it when they search.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Julie Paradise

Naaah, you can't just stop ANYWHERE! One has to always stop so that the page ends with a finished sentence. (Yeah, I know, each one his:her own madness, and it shows in the small things ...) ;-)

Aha! I'll keep that in mind the next time I read a novel that has only one sentence! (I assume you'll be serving coffee?)

[Renate]

I usually go back half a page anyway so it hardly matters where I stop.

[John F]

When you want to know the length of an ebook, and Amazon gives you a file size of 3019KB.

[Aleron Ives]

I always use Kobo for that purpose, since the length is reported in words.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

I always use Kobo for that purpose, since the length is reported in words.

Thank you for that. Kobo also has number of pages.

[nabsltd]

Many Kindle books have a "print length" in their description, which gives page count. Sometimes it's only down lower in the details, but it's usually there.

It's fairly meaningless, though, as the "Count Pages" add-in for Calibre gives me around 270 words/page on all the books I have purchased, but using the Amazon page count, the words/page varies from around 200 to 260

[Renate]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

It's fairly meaningless...

I don't know why everybody has to put page count under a microscope.
When I get a book I just want to know what I'm dealing with.
Under 100 "pages", a short read.
250 "pages" a normal book.
500 "pages" a big read.
1000 "pages" a brick.

In short, I'd like to know floor(2*ln(pages)/ln(2)-15.5) please.

 100 p -> -3
 150 p -> -2
 200 p -> -1
 250 p ->  0
 350 p ->  1
 500 p ->  2
 750 p ->  3
1000 p ->  4

[arjaybe]

There's nothing more accurate than the word count.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

There's nothing more accurate than the word count.

Disagree. There’s “a” and there’s “antidisestablishmentarianism”. Yes, I kid, but the general point remains; word count is lower for more complex books of similar length.

My favorite standard is the ADE page count, consistent across books and which helps offset the word length issue. Granted, it doesn’t take into account indices etc. but neither does word count, and at least with ADE page count it’s easy enough to subtract that out.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

There's nothing more accurate than the word count.

No, you should use text-to-speech and get the running time.

I try to borrow a book for the minimal time.
I just have to know what I'm dealing with.
One site has 1, 4, 7, 14 day selections.
Most have 7, 14, 28 day selection.
With the latter, I hate to say 7 days and then realize the book is 1000 pages.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by issybird

My favorite standard is the ADE page count, consistent across books and which helps offset the word length issue.

If I'm not mistaken, the limitation of Adobe's synthetic page numbering system is that it counts bytes, rather than characters, so books with more complex formatting register as being longer than books with simpler formatting, even when they have the same number of printable characters.

[DNSB]

The page number alogrithm does not just count bytes, it counts compressed bytes for the 1024 byte page length and then uses unicode characters to distribute the page breaks.

Years back when I compare two ePub files, one with 200,000 words in English that averaged 5.7 characters per word and the other with 200,000 glyphs in Simplified Chinese, the end files sizes were fairly close and the page count was within 10%. Note that both of these were synthetic texts generated by a cousin to Lorem Ipsum tool so that may easily have affected the way that 7-Zip compressed the ePub file.

Synthetic page names

When page map is not available in the document, Adobe Digital Editions will synthesize a page-map based on the document content. The approach used is the following:

1. Determine a compressed byte length of each resource which is referenced in the spine, subtracting any known encryption overhead (IV size).
2. Assume that there is a page for each 1024 bytes in each resource, rounding up to the nearest whole number of pages for each resource.
3. To map page breaks into a resource, use the number of pages for the resource as determined in step 2, count the number of Unicode characters in the resource; distribute synthetic page breaks in the resource evenly between the characters by dividing the number of characters by the number of pages; if the number of characters don’t divide evenly among the pages, round the number of characters per page up and let the last “page” contain less characters than the rest.

[ownedbycats]

In my Calibre library, I also keep track of paper books.

My personal method was to take a couple of ePubs where I also had a physical copy then just adjusted the numbers until I felt all of them were 'close enough' (also took the various sizes into mind - smaller mass-market paperbacks and larger hardbacks.) Then I ran that over every eBook in my library.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Renate

In short, I'd like to know floor(2*ln(pages)/ln(2)-15.5) please.

The problem with this is that the listed page count can be so far off that it moves 2 "buckets" from reality.

I have several books where Amazon lists over 250 pages, but the word count is less than 50K. On some of them, I own the paperback original from the 50's (160 pages) and a hardcover reprint from the 80's (144 pages).