Ebook Formating Tool Wishlist

[Jeff Duntemann]

Originally Posted by tompe

That will not work since there is no guarantee that the small size or the pagination will be the same after a firmware update or with the next model of the Sony Reader.

True, true. Worse, it says nothing about pagefall on any other current or future device or reader utility other than the Sony. Font rendering is a fluky business; furthermore, e-ink technology is in its infancy, and even if the physical size of the display unit does not change, its resolution probably will--and that affects text rendering as well. We have to take the future evolution of readers into account.

[kovidgoyal]

I thought we'd decided eons ago that the correct way to do referencing is by section and paragraph numbers?

[moz]

I don't think there is a compact way to cite references in electronic text. The best you can hope for is a target tag somewhere close to your cite. This is already a problem with web pages (even ignoring their transient nature) and leads to cites like "approx 1/3 through page www.foo.org/... as archived in June 2007 at www.archive.org/... in the section containing 'thus spake Zarathustra'". Ugly but effective, and always available as a fallback if the page author is so rude as to not supply targets for each paragraph (or at least each chapter).

[moz]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I thought we'd decided eons ago that the correct way to do referencing is by section and paragraph numbers?

For works that number paragraphs that's fine, but especially for fiction it gets ridiculous fast (hand-counting to find paragraph 1234 in a single-section novel?)

[Jeff Duntemann]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Jeff, how do you handle differing page numbers in say a hard cover vs a paperback or even a different edition where page numbers change?

This is certainly a problem in the pbook world, but editions have been with us for more than a century, and researchers citing modern books build that into their footnotes. These days each edition must be a separate ISBN, so that provides yet some additional precision for citation, if a book is modern enough to have an ISBN. Most researchers cite the editions you find in libraries, which are for the most part the first hardcover editions. This isn't foolproof, but in my own research area (the history of religion) I've had relatively little trouble following citations even when multiple editions of a work exist.

As print publishing comes to rely more and more on POD technology over the next 15 or 20 years, we may find that pagefall in a trade paperback is identical to that in a hardcover. To a POD machine the two are the same; the only difference being the sort of binding that the printed pages are given.

That will likely be how print books fade into a specialty from the mainstream: Publishers will no longer print in bulk, but will publish an ebook and a POD pbook simultaneously, and let the purchaser choose paperback vs. hardcover vs. ebook at the time of purchase, based on a "master view" that may be stored as a PDF or something better. This could work by ordering online or through book machines in the back rooms of bookstores. I call that "replenish-on-demand" and have spoken of it on my blog, though it's OT here. A system like that is certainly how I'd prefer to do it.

Even if print books were to vanish by next week, we'd still have the fundamental question of how to unambiguously cite a passage in a reflowable ebook in a device and reader-independent way without using hyperlinks. Ebooks in fact represent a golden opportunity to solve that problem, but I don't see much interest in the industry for solving it.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by tompe

That will not work since there is no guarantee that the small size or the pagination will be the same after a firmware update or with the next model of the Sony Reader.

Small if very arbitrary on the Sony. Someone else could build the exact same book where Small is a totally different font size so it is meaningless.

Dale

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by moz

For works that number paragraphs that's fine, but especially for fiction it gets ridiculous fast (hand-counting to find paragraph 1234 in a single-section novel?)

umm if you're reading an ebook, the computer will count paragraphs for you.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Jeff Duntemann

Even if print books were to vanish by next week, we'd still have the fundamental question of how to unambiguously cite a passage in a reflowable ebook in a device and reader-independent way without using hyperlinks. Ebooks in fact represent a golden opportunity to solve that problem, but I don't see much interest in the industry for solving it.

again, section+paragraph

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Jeff Duntemann

What I really need is probably a little more than a 500-hour project, fersure (especially if executed in C++) but here's the gist: I'd like to have a way to generate a fully paginated pbook print image (basically, a PDF) as well as all the major reflowable ebook file formats without losing pbook page equivalence.

That's interesting. So source -> PDF, PDF -> page-numbers, source + page-numbers -> reflowable formats. I don't think this would be difficult at all -- let alone a 500+ hour project -- unless you were tying your arm behind your back by requiring this not make use of any existing tools.

Originally Posted by Jeff Duntemann

In other words, I want there to be page markers in my reflowable ebooks that map to page boundaries in my pbooks..... One of my nightmares is a future day when I can't cite a passage in an ebook from print because there's no standard human-readable way to specify a location within the ebook.

Ok, so you want a single location-reference mechanism which operates across print and e-book editions? That is, allows one to find the cited location equally well in both a p- and e-book edition of the work in question? And the problem with just either embedding paragraph number in p-books or page-number in e-books is that they're distracting?

It sounds like the solution here would be an e-book format which separates style from content and allows the user to select among different stylesheets (like XHTML+CSS). The content would contain the page-boundary markup, but it would be undisplayed in the normal stylesheet. The user could then select an alternative stylesheet which would show the p-book-corresponding page numbers.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

again, section+paragraph

You can't cite the p-book edition of a work of literature by section+paragraph. Chapters may not be numbered or indexed in any fashion. Heck, there might not be any division larger than the paragraph at all! I think he wants a mechanism which one can use to identify a location in the p-book edition of a work and find that same location in the corresponding e-book edition, and vice versa.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

again, section+paragraph

But what is a paragraph? When you have lists then the list can belong to the paragraph or be its own paragraph. And usually you cannot easily see from the typgraphy of a book what holds. And in Word I think you cannot make that distinction. Or take a mathematical displayed formula. Does the text after belong to the same paragraph or not?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by llasram

That's interesting. So source -> PDF, PDF -> page-numbers, source + page-numbers -> reflowable formats. I don't think this would be difficult at all -- let alone a 500+ hour project -- unless you were tying your arm behind your back by requiring this not make use of any existing tools.



Ok, so you want a single location-reference mechanism which operates across print and e-book editions? That is, allows one to find the cited location equally well in both a p- and e-book edition of the work in question? And the problem with just either embedding paragraph number in p-books or page-number in e-books is that they're distracting?

It sounds like the solution here would be an e-book format which separates style from content and allows the user to select among different stylesheets (like XHTML+CSS). The content would contain the page-boundary markup, but it would be undisplayed in the normal stylesheet. The user could then select an alternative stylesheet which would show the p-book-corresponding page numbers.

no i think a better solution (at least a more elegant one) is:

- if a book has only a pbook version refer to it by page number

- if a book has an ebook version refer to it by paragraph number

All thats needed for this is to have reader software tht can overlay paragraph numbers

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by tompe

But what is a paragraph? When you have lists then the list can belong to the paragraph or be its own paragraph. And usually you cannot easily see from the typgraphy of a book what holds. And in Word I think you cannot make that distinction. Or take a mathematical displayed formula. Does the text after belong to the same paragraph or not?

As long as you're consistent, it doesn't matter.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by llasram

You can't cite the p-book edition of a work of literature by section+paragraph. Chapters may not be numbered or indexed in any fashion. Heck, there might not be any division larger than the paragraph at all! I think he wants a mechanism which one can use to identify a location in the p-book edition of a work and find that same location in the corresponding e-book edition, and vice versa.

Again if a ebook version exists, the computer will number chapters for you. if only a print version exists, use page numbers, or more likely, dont refer to that work, since no one will be able to access it.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Again if a ebook version exists, the computer will number chapters for you. if only a print version exists, use page numbers, or more likely, dont refer to that work, since no one will be able to access it.

Ha Ha, I like that. I prefer chapters (sections) followed by paragraphs my self. Many specifications in the technical arena use exactly that kind of numbering and actually number the entries explicitly in the document but I agree it is not necessary since a computer can easily number them.

Interestingly the Kindle counts characters and increments a number every 128 characters in the file. I don't care for that solution since it has no human intelligence like paragraphs do but it is as intelligent as a page number and doesn't care about font sizes or page sizes.

Dale