Kindle ebooks not downloading right, or....?

[Famine]

I've noticed that when I download books via wi-fi, sometimes my books have page numbers and locations, but others have just locations.

It's becoming a real nuisance because it's making my horror buddy reads frustrating when we don't know who's up to what page. Concerning the same book between friends, some of us get both pages & locations, the others only get location.

The books are Richard Laymon's Darkness, Tell us More, and Stephen King's It.

Is this a random issue when downloading ebooks, or is it an intentional difference between publication of Australian and US Kindle orders?

[Kat]

I noticed that too, but it could be the formatting of the file itself.

[Famine]

Has anybody tried re-downloading the book to fix it?

[Char]

Some books do not have page numbers, most especially older Kindle books.
When we do buddy reads here, we sometimes go by the chapter numbers, that way we can be sure everyone is in the same place when they're discussing the book.

[Myst]

2 different countries. You probably have different 'versions' and whoever did the formatting for one particular country did it differently from the other.

What you could do is percentages. That way if someone's reading a paper copy, they can do a 5 second math equation to figure out approx. where they are compared to you.

So if you say you're 43% through IT, one of your buddies is reading the 1100 page paperback, you're on pg 473 for them.

Locations tend to be worthless. I've had 2 different versions of Don Quixote on my kindle. One said it was only 400 pages long (wrong!), the other said 800ish pages, so locations between the 2 copies would be different.

[GracieKat]

Some have them and some don't. It is annoying though because i like to go by how many minutes in a chapter to figure out how much more I can read before bed. :)

[Char]

Grace wrote: "Some have them and some don't. It is annoying though because i like to go by how many minutes in a chapter to figure out how much more I can read before bed. :)"

I like that feature too and I hate when the books don't have it.

[Randy]

As I understand it, in order for Kindle books to have page numbers, the publisher has to provide a mapping of locations to page numbers. And those page numbers will usually refer to a particular print edition.

[Famine]

Yeah, locations are worthless! I've never in my life used them.

Page # also lets me know how much I've read in a night, I keep track with an app on my ipad, but I can't with these #less books :( Annoying.

So I guess the consensus is that it's not a random kindle error, but a publisher's decision.

[Randy]

Why can't you just use location # instead of page #?

I usually refer to the % done to note my progress.

[Famine]

Some of us are reading the hardcopy, so... Yeah

[Randy]

Wolfrott wrote: "Some of us are reading the hardcopy, so... Yeah"

So pages numbers on the Kindle would be meaningless for you unless they were keyed directly to that particular hardcopy edition of the book?

That is a current problem with page numbers. They can give you different references in the book depending on the version of the book. Hardcopy? Paperback? Large Print edition? 2nd edition? 3rd edition? Complete and Uncut edition?

[Famine]

We've had no problem so far with page numbers differing between hardcopy and kindle.

[Randy]

So no one every reads the paperback edition? :)

The Bible has chapter and verse, so references are even consistent between different languages.

[Famine]

Er, I just said that we've had no problems with not being 'on the same page'. Our versions of the book, kindle and hardcopy, haven't given us incorrect page numbers.

[Randy]

...which just means the publisher's "location to print page" mapping is based on the hardcopy edition that others are using...