Indeed.

> When I read an ebook, I could care less what “page”
> I’m on.

You probably mean that you couldn’t care less.

> We don’t need to come up with a “standard” page size
> in order to communicate effectively about an
> electronic book.

True, but it would be terribly efficient if people would agree on some sensible way to communicate about locations in books.

> We just need to tag (and perhaps anchor) content
> throughout the book, with human and/or machine
> readable tags.

1) That only works for stuff you can modify.
2) Two versions of the same text can be tagged in conflicting ways.

If we’d use paragraph, word and/or letter numbers it’d work with pretty much everything, and without the two problems above.

Each section can contain an arbitrary amount of information, from a few lines, to a zillion piles of (possibly mind-numbing) data.

Pages may mean less and less, and in my opinion were never a terribly good way to indicate where in a book we were talking about (since each size and edition of a print book can end up with the same information ending up with a different page number).

But chapters? Sections? Bookmarks?

Those are rad.

When I read an ebook, I could care less what “page” I’m on. But I do jump around between chapters, and section markers, and bookmarks.

And I use hyperlinks, etc.

We don’t need to come up with a “standard” page size in order to communicate effectively about an electronic book. That’s just silly.

We just need to tag (and perhaps anchor) content throughout the book, with human and/or machine readable tags. A naming convention might be nice, but even that wouldn’t be strictly necessary.

I’m a novelist, and all I’ve been reading is that fiction ebooks don’t sell. True? Why?

Thank you for any insight into this matter.

You are completely missing the point. It doesn’t matter what size some particular screen is. The relevant fact is that the same content will be shown in different text sizes, perhaps with different fonts or line heights and probably also on screens of different sizes. So, some cross-device “page size” metric is no longer the size of your actual page, but some arbitrary number of words, perhaps relative to the default font size the author/publisher specified and perhaps with different heading weights or chapter-related page-breaks, or somesuch arbitrarily chosen parameters that are more or less unrelated to the screen of some device.

So, if you’re talking about this arbitrarily selected combination of parameters for constructing an artificial page metric then it’s in no way related to what is shown on the display of some particular device at some particular time. OTOH, if you’re talking about a page actually shown on the screen of some device at some particular time then the term is meaningless for other devices or even the same device with other settings.

These facts are simple to understand, and as far as I can see there is no other logical conclusion than that using “page” as a metric is illogical and misleading (and thus probably counterproductive).

A page may not be the most logical division, but it certainly is a very psychological one. (Those who disagree perhaps don’t read much except blogs).

I agree, and I don’t think that. (I suspect my “rudeness” is an expression of frustration caused by my helplessness against an overwhelming stupidity in the world. I don’t really dislike even grossly stupid people as such, but I do hate stupidity.)

I didn’t call any particular person stupid. If you yourself think you are one of the “stupid people stuck on illogical notions of how something “has to be”” then you are calling yourself stupid.

However, if you truly get hung up on ad hominem arguments like “You are rude, therefore you are wrong.” then you are indeed one of those people.

> The whole academic community that works with notion
> of research is used to quoting other people’s work
> using page numbers.

Oh, c’mon! Different universities, journals, proceedings, etc. use different formats for references and bibliographies. Heck, even different faculties within a university often use different formats. And the formats vary after what the targets of the references are. E.g., now when papers refer to webpages (which are inherently pageless) they seldom include any page numbers, and when they do it’s usually more out of ignorance than anything else. (A webpage included as an appendix in a paged format will obviously have pages that can be referred to, but then you’re referring to the paged appendix and not the webpage directly and thus that doesn’t count in this context.)

Very few universities, journals, conferences, etc. have already decided how to format references to ebooks, which are inherently pageless. Thus when they do make that decision they wouldn’t be changing anything if they decide to use e.g. paragraph numbers or letter numbers or just settle for chapter numbers for now. If some of them do decide to go with page numbers for some pageless format, such as webpages or ebooks, then that would indeed be a very stupid decision.

Stupidity is not far off when cluelessness reigns, and unfortunately a large portion of the old academia suffers from total cluelessness regarding digital media. I know professors who can’t read their own email, but have assistants to print out messages on paper and afterwards type in handwritten/spoken responses. I know professors who think the web is a 1-way channel like broadcast TV/radio. These people have unfortunately got stuck in an earlier epoch (often partially without them even realizing it).

As these people just barely lost the vote to keep an artificial “scroll number” back when pages were a new thing we can always hope they might have learned something from that. (Clarification: This paragraph is mostly a joke.)

> calling people “stupid” when they express views
> different to yours

You are either ignorant or lying. I have never, ever in my life (as far back as I can remember, which excludes my first 5 or so years) called someone stupid for expressing a view that is different to mine!

> using 250-word ‘pages’ as markers [...] provides a
> handy way to judge distances between where you are
> and where you are going.

‘Paragraphs’, ‘words’ or ‘letters’ (with SI-prefix as needed, e.g. “kilowords”) are just as good, except for the fact that some people are not used to them yet. (Some are, though. E.g., some people are often given the task of writing an “N word essay/article” or even an “N letter essay/article”.)

After thinking about it for a good 5 seconds I’d say that I prefer paragraphs for references (since then there’s a (remote) chance it’d work even with translated versions), and letters for length (since then the actual size is not so language-specific (although it’d still be specific to the type of grapheme used, so maybe there’s something better that would work similarly even with asian, logograph-based languages)).

Getting used to something like this is a non-issue. If you read/write much then you’d get used to it in no time flat, if you sometimes read/write you only need to know how to approximately convert to whatever metric you’re more familiar with, and if you hardly ever read/write then it doesn’t matter whether you’re used to any particular metric or not.

If someone does decide to name and use some arbitrary number of words then I would highly recommend against using “page” or any other related word that already has a specific meaning. Having pages of different “pages” is just asking for trouble, and will cause needless confusion.

> For born-digital books, the standard bibliographic
> information in a footnote could be followed by:
> “search on ’search string’” instead of the page
> number.

That is orthogonal to the “paged vs. pageless” issues.

http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/article/digital-directions-does-design-matter-digital-distribution-175953_1.html

Digital Directions: Does Design Matter in Digital Distribution?
By Andrew Brenneman
Oct 1, 2008

An important characteristic of digital content is its ability to deliver to multiple platforms simultaneously—to print, Web and mobile channels. Invariably, the same content will look different when viewed on various output devices, and it should. Each device has its own display characteristics, and the design of the presentation should be optimized for that device. [... more ...]

For example, if a novel is published online and is 10 chapters and 100,000 words, it would be easier to think of it as 400 pages, even though it may never see print.

Now, cant we all just get along?

The whole academic community that works with notion of research is used to quoting other people’s work using page numbers. If you take page numbers away, you’re all on your own convincing all of these “stupid people” that they need to adapt a different way of quoting each other’s works in order to make their research independently verifiable.

And yes, calling people “stupid” when they express views different to yours really tells more about you that anything you say.

The world seems to agree on that part, Mark – you’re trying to change that. As I have mentioned, the whole academic research spins around being able to quote things in order to verify someone’s research. Again, I’m not inventing anything here – take a look at Sony Reader. It *can* reflow PDFs. When reflowed, it *may* take up to five *screens* of Sony device to show that particular *page*, but a page in PDF is always that page with universally quoteable page number.