04-01-2008, 05:26 PM | #16 | |
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Referencing to a precise location in an ebook is not a feature request from the typical leisure reader. But that is only one possible use of an ereader among other. |
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04-01-2008, 05:30 PM | #17 | |
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Okay. I'll grant you that it is a possible 'feature' some readers may want. Now let me explain something. Not every 'feature' requested by some (or one) user is necessarily appropriate for any given application. (Can you tell I've worked for pointy-haired bosses as a programmer? Does it show? ) Derek |
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04-01-2008, 06:03 PM | #18 | |
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If it is not implemented as a feature in reader software, my quess is that some publishers will go ahead and embed page numbers (or paragraph numbers) directly into the text of the page in order to make their books (other than Harry Potter) suitable for their audience. That would not be a good solution. |
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04-01-2008, 06:21 PM | #19 | |
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04-01-2008, 06:32 PM | #20 |
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What I'm doing when I scan books is including page numbers as ID's on paragraph tags since I use HTML as my master copy. This means that the page number might be off by a paragraph, but it will be close enough to work as a reference. I'm not currently including a list of links to the page numbers in the file, they're more there if I want to make an index later. Plus, of course, some of them are missing since my scan+OCR process misses a few and fiction books often leave out numbers on chapter heading pages.
I don't currently make an opf with publication details - is there a good tool for editing that? What other information is left out of the HTML? I don't put cover scans in the file but I keep them with the book (I want not to have the cover scans in the lrf on my reader). |
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04-01-2008, 09:17 PM | #21 | |
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Some, but not all, Baen ebooks already include explicit paragraph numbers. For example, the start and end of The Mountains of Mourning:
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I agree with kovidgoyal that paragraph numbers are best for referencing, and should always be available (particularly as they are easy to generate). The only argument for page numbers is that they are about the right size for humans to deal with, and here I am talking about physical book pages. I know that some people strongly object to device independent "page" sizes for ebooks, but I like FBReader's approach of defining a page as a fixed number of characters. One way to think of this is as another way of representing the fraction of the book read, but in people friendly units. The Kindle has a similar scheme, but its quantum is way too small - leading to huge "page" counts. |
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04-01-2008, 10:22 PM | #22 | |
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Made up example: '...and that's the story. 'But which way do we go?' he asked. Is that one paragraph or two? If the first line is just before a page break and the second just after, it's not necessarily obvious. You have to read through and guess which character(s) spoke, and deal with the missing quote in your own way. These corrections are easy enough for me to do now, since I have the original images and can check against them. If you got a passage like that off the net you'd have no chance. It's not helped by lax typography, which a genuine instance of ".' '" in one book I read - I'd normally hit that with a regex to insert a paragraph marker but when I found it in the book it was unusual enough that I wrote it down as a reminder. After some consideration, I decided that it was not actually a proofing error in the book and should be left as is, or (as I did) have the quotes removed. Also, remember that between unicode and html we have something like 8 or 10 paragraph markers to choose from. That said, I think paragraph markers are the least awful standard. |
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04-02-2008, 01:33 AM | #23 | |
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Heck for books that essentially use HTML the adding of a value for the "id" value of the html tags is already there for the taking, no extra custom stuff needed. EDIT: well, maybe the ID tag might not be ideal...some books might already use it for other uses so using it as a way to ID paragraphs would likely cause a mess...custom tags to the rescue I guess. Last edited by brecklundin; 04-02-2008 at 01:39 AM. |
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04-02-2008, 06:50 AM | #24 | |
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Sure, the page numbers can change among devices or as one changes the settings in a single device... but page numbers also change from paperback to hardcover, from illustrated to commented editions, from the original to translations... So page numbers are sometimes not that useful in paper books. Even for estimating how much of the book has been read, one has physical size in paper books. I say that, as long as the text is displayed in "pages", one may wish to have page numbers, for whatever reason. Even for (informal) referencing, saying "page 217 of 582" is probably more useful than "about one third of the book". |
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04-02-2008, 11:08 AM | #25 | |
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Derek |
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04-02-2008, 11:36 AM | #26 | |
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04-02-2008, 11:50 AM | #27 | |
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04-02-2008, 11:51 AM | #28 | |
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Contrast that to the Sony. The Sony does "real" pagination, and when you jump to a hyperlink the destination of the jump is wherever it "should" be on that page. |
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04-02-2008, 11:53 AM | #29 | |
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04-02-2008, 12:04 PM | #30 |
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Quite a few of the books I've created have footnotes (eg the Rider Haggard books tend to have a lot of footnotes). What I always do is move them all to the end of the book, and create a hyperlink from the reference in the text to the relevent footnote (although I suppose "endnote" would be a more accurate term). On the Sony version of the book, the footnote you jump to might be half way down the page; on the Mobi version, the text you jump to is always at the top of the page.
As you say, for chapter links, etc, where you want to be at the top of a page anyway, there's no difference. That's why, though, when you add new books to the Sony it grinds away for a minute or so when you first open the book, or first select a new font size - it's paginating the book. Mobi devices don't do "real" pagination. |
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