Comments on: “Pages” in ePub: Adobe’s page-map versus NCX pageList

By: Irwin

Irwin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:46:17 +0000

(Sorry, Keith. Thought you were Liza.)

By: Irwin

Irwin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:45:36 +0000

The idea of a page is necessarily rooted in reference to the book as physical object. The same way the icon for email is still a paper envelope. Because we’re at a transitional period, most people need the comfort of referring to a “page” rather than a “location” as Kindle puts it. But I would like to point out that Bible readers and scholars have been citing not pages but chapter:verse for a very long time. We just need to get used to applying the same system to all electronic reading material.

I wish browsers (really the HTML spec) would give you granularity down to the character. I smell a jQuery plugin that needs to be written…

(BTW, I love your work, Liza. Keep it going!)

By: Micah Bowers

Micah Bowers — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:42:41 +0000

Yes, in DE the way the page number display works + the fact that you can’t turn it off is very, very unfortunate (bugs). I’m looking forward to seeing that fixed.

BTW, I respectfully disagree about whether most books need a page map. How else could humans communicate about content locations in a reflowable document? And, If publishers don’t include it, the reading system has to generate it programatically – which is far less optimal. Caveat is the lack of consistent implementation to a standard. So it is a fair question about whether to go with the extension that at least works on Adobe SDK devices or with pagelist which may be supported in the future by some reading systems.

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:07:36 +0000

it amazes me how far down this particular road
that you .epub people still need to travel…

i strongly encourage you to spend some more time
engaging in thought and discussion on the topic…

-bowerbird

By: Lindsey Thomas Martin

Lindsey Thomas Martin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:19:26 +0000

You wrote:
‘My personal opinion is that this sort of print-centrism is unnecessary for the vast majority of titles’.

For the most part, I agree with you on this. There is, however, a precedent in scholarly publishing for this sort of ‘page mapping’, when it was useful to link editions of classical authors to a standard edition so passages could be compared easily. The Stephanus pagination used in editions of Plato is an example. Had the editions been digital and thus easily searched, such an expedient would have been less necessary, though it is still convenient in discussion to have a short-hand way to refer to passages from a corpus.