Closed GeorgeKerscher closed 2 years ago
We - as a distributor of ebooks - will soon demand that all ebooks has a page number accociated in the metadata. If none is provided by the publisher, we will calculate a virtual page number:
1 A4 page = 1,800 characters - for eg. novels and text books / for childrens books we are not fully decided yet π
But if the community decides on a common page number calculation algrithm, whatever language, we are all ears.
Missing page numbers are frequently cited by our academic customers as a barrier to adopting EPUB. For us the most common complaint is what George mentions around citations. This would help close that gap. We are also considering an in-house virtual page number algorithm, but would prefer to base this off of something from the specification.
Wiley creates virtual page numbers for e-only books. Customers (especially for textbooks) expect page numbers.
The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-03-11
The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-03-12
The issue was discussed in a meeting on 2021-03-18
We've long discussed (citations needed; sorry, insufficient time) the need for finer-granularity references in addition to page numbers -- or virtual page numbers -- in EPUB as well as in other uses of CSS and HTML. But as we're seeing even with web browsers there's not yet an established UI metaphor for "show me the URI to this bit of what I'm seeing (or hearing) on the screen". Page numbers, for better or worse, don't require any extra effort on the part of the reader to find and cite.
I really want my web browser and my reading system to make it easy to copy and paste a fine-grained and resolvable identifier to a specific portion of a work.
Google's link to text fragments are interesting, though, as they appear to operate on the same text locator basis as we've discussed in the past around web annotations. They add in some of the surrounding context to improve the reliability of the link.
It doesn't solve how to cite into a packaged epub, and isn't an easy mechanism for keeping pace in a print environment, but is perhaps some promising proof that text locators are a viable way of getting to a consistent destination (in text-based works, of course).
Having multiple ways to locate a position in a work isn't necessarily a bad thing, either, so it's not like we're in a zero-sum game anyway where we can only end up with authored page breaks or something else.
Distributors of EPUB and end users are requesting that a best practice be developed for inserting a "virtual Page Number." One distributor said they are considering to put virtual page numbers in for all EPUB titles ingested that do not already have the page numbers. Of course, where the EPUB is based on an existing physical book, the page numbers associated with the book must be used. However, the virtual page number can be very useful for:
Publishers may also consider providing this as a feature in their titles that do not have a print counterpart.
Specifically what has been discussed is to establish a standardized algorithm for inserting page break locaters in the text and in the NavDoc in the page list. The algorithm would look something like: