The Amazon Kindle numbering Scheme
Tricky.
You can't use percentages - 1 % of a 1000 page book covers 10 pages - and you cannot use the PHYSICAL book paging scheme since it still could be spread over 5 screen views or more based on font and size of the font picked by the user (thought if going to page 50 would always mean going to the 1st item on page 50 of the printed book and then scrolling to find the actual point) but then if a book is NEVER printed and only published as one long single continuous web page like document - there ARE no page numbers!
So it seems they decided to use a hard logical method based on text characters from the beginning - and since that is countable and what is seen on any page would STILL vary - they had to say that if you go to a particular spot in a book it would fall within this RANGE progress of all the text in a book that what you are looking at - that will never vary with the font style selected and the point size of that font.
Course EXPLAINING that to people seems to have never occurred to them!
Like driving across Montana without ever looking at the odometer or mileage signs. You leave a town and someone calls and you tell them you are 30 minutes out of town - the actual distance could be 15 miles to 90 miles depending on how fast you are driving. But if you use miles and state you are 45 miles from town they know where you are at - but have no clue as to how fast you are going. You need both to pinpoint you location and how long it will take to get elsewhere. The font style and size is like that - and since you cannot use them to mark progress when reading they just made up a new measuring rate based on progress from point a to b without knowing the exact distance between the two - and that's the reason for the progress bar I suspect.
You can't use percentages - 1 % of a 1000 page book covers 10 pages - and you cannot use the PHYSICAL book paging scheme since it still could be spread over 5 screen views or more based on font and size of the font picked by the user (thought if going to page 50 would always mean going to the 1st item on page 50 of the printed book and then scrolling to find the actual point) but then if a book is NEVER printed and only published as one long single continuous web page like document - there ARE no page numbers!
So it seems they decided to use a hard logical method based on text characters from the beginning - and since that is countable and what is seen on any page would STILL vary - they had to say that if you go to a particular spot in a book it would fall within this RANGE progress of all the text in a book that what you are looking at - that will never vary with the font style selected and the point size of that font.
Course EXPLAINING that to people seems to have never occurred to them!
Like driving across Montana without ever looking at the odometer or mileage signs. You leave a town and someone calls and you tell them you are 30 minutes out of town - the actual distance could be 15 miles to 90 miles depending on how fast you are driving. But if you use miles and state you are 45 miles from town they know where you are at - but have no clue as to how fast you are going. You need both to pinpoint you location and how long it will take to get elsewhere. The font style and size is like that - and since you cannot use them to mark progress when reading they just made up a new measuring rate based on progress from point a to b without knowing the exact distance between the two - and that's the reason for the progress bar I suspect.
posted by Tom Philo at 12:34 PM
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