Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion
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2018 Team Competition Tracker/Google Sheet Central
You guys don't have to count me, except in the team competition... I can't help it how I read... But For other stuff, you can just take my stats off:) I am cool with that:) I find myself a bit ashamed to add my points...
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I'll fiddle ..."
For Malazan everybody should use the longest page count available. There's some Michael J Sullivan and Mark Lawrence books that are 500-600 pages and have a third of the word count of Deadhouse Gates and that's one of the shorter Malazan books. That really isn't fair.
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Choko, just keep doing what you're doing. This is all for fun. You have nothing to be ashamed by. Just keep rolling up your numbers.
Scott wrote: "Choko wrote: "You guys don't have to count me, except in the team competition... I can't help it how I read... But For other stuff, you can just take my stats off:) I am cool with that:) I find mys..."Thanks, Scott! I am one of those people who finds joy in the reading thing and I am truly addicted... I wouldn't know what to do otherwise, and you guys have created the perfect atmosphere for to support my addiction:):):):) Cheers, all!!!
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Yes, Julia's page counts are definitely a bit inflated.
Ideally, I'd love to do word count too as our..."
Iain wrote: "I mocked it up... I just copied the Scorecard tab, deleted all the repeat stuff, and got it to track and sort people by pages read...
Julia jumped to 2nd place since she's 200pgs ahead of me at th..."
Let's not overthink this process. This is for fun. Rob your spreadsheet is perfect.
IMO using the largest English published word count is as close to fair as we can get. There are large books out there with 600-1200 page differences in version. Usually these are really high word counts and deserve the higher number.
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Glad to support our codependency. :)
Scott wrote: "Choko wrote: "Thanks, Scott! I am one of those people who finds joy in the reading thing and I am truly addicted... I wouldn't know what to do otherwise, and you guys have created the perfect atmos..."I hereby ditto this sentiment.I'm still technically in other groups (sword and laser) on Goodreads, but in order to reduce the burden of my inbox, I think I can cut them off in favor of this one, though I'll stay in the Malazan one - that's a treasure trove of info :)
Part of me thinks it might even be nice to set up a facebook group for this Buddy reads just to more easily share stuff/be connected etc.
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Yes, Julia's page counts are definitely a bit inflated.
Ideally, I'd love to do word coun..."
I wish there was an accurate and extensive database for word counts for books. I know personally that page counts hurt sometimes; I read the Revelation Space Series by Alastair Reynolds and that was the most words per page I've seen along with Deadhouse.
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Yes, Julia's page counts are definitely a bit inflated.
Ideally, I'd love to do word coun..."
We can just leave my mockup as-is for now... it shows the info me and Yanique wanted to see, and doesn't clutter up the official scorecard...
Part of the problem with using the largest pagecount stemmed from Earth's Children having Extra-Large Print editions that were way longer, and Stormlight Archive having some weird Nook ebook editions that were 2000-3000 pages long...
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That would be nice.
DHG is on the shorter side for BotF. Word count per book.
1 Gardens of the Moon 209,000
2 Deadhouse Gates 272,000
3 Memories of Ice 358,000
4 House of Chains 306,000
5 Midnight Tides 270,000
6 The Bonehunters 365,000
7 Reaper's Gale 386,000
8 Toll the Hounds 392,000
9 Dust of Dreams 382,000
10 The Crippled God 385,000
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I'm anti-facebook... I have a decade-old account from college, but I only login when people force me...
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I think we need to accept there isn't a perfect system at our disposal. I'm obviously not going to use the 3000 page nook edition but if I'm doing 300-400K word count that's worthy of the longest mainstream English edition.
@Iainright on! I use social media now only to message my one RL friend. Only because he doesn't use skype or discord OR GR
Diana Stormblessed wrote: "Hi five! My degree is macro economics, too."
Woohoo. High five.
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Most books the most popular pagecount is fine... Sookie Stackhouse books FEEL ~300 pages long... and they are... same with the Drizzt books or my Nightside books... other feel like 600 pages... or 900...
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right on! I use social media now only to message my one RL friend. Only because he doesn't use skype or discord OR GR"
I have a college roommate I communicate with through Steam's messenger... not as convenient now that he has 2 kids...
Scott wrote: "IMO using the largest English published word count is as close to fair as we can get. There are large books out there with 600-1200 page differences in version. Usually these are really high word counts and deserve the higher number."Are we doing this for every book or this applies just to Malazan?
Samir wrote: "Scott wrote: "IMO using the largest English published word count is as close to fair as we can get. There are large books out there with 600-1200 page differences in version. Usually these are real..."I don't think we should change the rules. That Malazan are more dense than e.g. A Throne of Glass is just too bad. Everyone reading Malazan are getting their time spent repayed by SE.
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I've been doing it with everything. Without accurate word counts I think it's the best way.
If we do change the rule back to longest English page count we need to at least tell everyone... There's quite a few books where the most popular (as per the current rule) is a lot shorter page count.
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You just want an excuse to re-read Throne of Glass. :)
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I missed the part where anybody was doing the most popular version until it's come up in the past few days. If somebody really wanted to beat the system it would be easy to figure out the page count in relationship to the audiobook time and blast through them getting the max value per time invested.
Scott wrote: "You just want an excuse to re-read Throne of Glass. :) "Hahaha. What a complete waste of time. One of the worst 'fantasy' books I've ever read (- and no I'm not sorry to possible fans). You can easily find something better to do. Like watching paint dry or grass grow. ;)
Scott wrote: "Siobhan wrote: "If we do change the rule back to longest English page count we need to at least tell everyone... There's quite a few books where the most popular (as per the current rule) is a lot ..."Yeah we were told we have to use the most popular as it was easier to keep right than the longest page count (because of some of the anomalies Iain mentioned).
I still think longest would work with a common sense approach, like not using the 3000 page nook versions. But I suppose that leaves room for subjectivity and grey areas.
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https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
The rule change was the first announcement added to the Scorecard Tab on 1/3/2018:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
All this talk about page counts has had me looking at people's tabs this morning... and I see a number of instances where people are using longer edition counts... altho it could just be native language versions, since that was out one exception to the rule in the end...
We were told as a rule before the contest began that it has to be most popular version...I do understand the thought behind it because then everybody chooses the same edition and everyone gets the same points. Ultimately word count would be fairest but that’s not something GR provides. And I’m for example reading Infinite Jest and my Kindle version has 1400 pages while there’s paperback versions out there at 900. I do think we need a fair and consequent rule that everyone follows.
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There's just too many threads for any mod to view everything going on. Thus why there's 5 of us. So if that was at some point decided, which I believe all of you, I was never aware of it.
World Without End was 401K word count and Deadhouse Gate 272K. If I went with the popular editions I'd lose 300 pages on each. Meanwhile books like Lies of Locke Lamora or Price of Thorns are a handful of pages less at half to two-thirds the word count.
I think by using the max page count, within reason, you can only stretch lower word counts so far.
I've spent too much time on this for one day. I'll talk to Niki and abide by the group rules but I still like the original longest within reason English edition.
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Like I've ever read rules or directions in my life. :)
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Margret wrote: "Yeah I thought everyone was following the most popular rule. Many of my points totals would change if that were the case"Same! Mine would go up a lot, UK editions always seem to be more pages! XD
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In case you're wondering yes I know the two words are synonyms. To me though acquiesce is generally when I don't care and give in must to avoid the fight. Capituation has always mean I waved the white flag under duress while eating a turd sandwich because it's killing me.
This is somewhere in between. Probably a concession or a relenting. :)
I'll only say that check your 2018 books in the future because the most popular edition may change, like it did for Iron gold. It is now 600 pahes and not 634.Also some popular edition have no page counts, so I use the next most popular one.
The rule I have for my own stats outside the competition is to use the most popular PRINT edition.
So what are we using now most popular or longest?I think to avoid this confusion we should go with pages in first edition. That won't change with time or popularity of a particular edition.
Do we need to change the rule for THIS 2018 competition? at this point it will be tiresome to go back and check everything.
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what's so controversial about steampunk?
Lol. This thread has been most active for sure. Way too serious imo. The mods have done a great job and certainty I’ve tried to read a bunch more to get points. This challenge is a lot of fun but in might shut this thread down. Lol!!! Great job Nikki and Scott
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We had a discussiona few months ago about Urban Fantasy, Steampunk, and all it's sub-genres... what counts as steampunk... whether to bother breaking it down into flintlock fantasy, weird western, Aetherpunk, SteamFantasy, Dieselpunk, etc etc etc...
Re:points: Pages are unlikely to change, unless the book is really new and an indie release... anything relatively established has 1000s more ratings than the 2nd most popular edition... and I don't think librarians edit page counts often once they are already set...
And this is why I don't like fiddling with the rules, or adding features to the spreadsheet... it starts to scare away people that just want to read books and have fun without overthinking it... even if I'm going to overthink it myself, regardless...
So, we're still using the most popular edition as the page counts right? I'll just re-check my pages with other people who read the same books, just to make sure.
Nice try Idiffer. I'm sure that very entertaining book is even longer than 10.000p :D
Good rule I've learned over the years of running fantasy baseball leagues - you can't change the rules once the contest has started. Every year has to be seen as an experiment. You use the years' results and tweak what didn't work for the following year. (And not-shockingly my main fantasy baseball league has had a constitution that has been somewhat tweaked every year for the past 18 or so years).I contacted Goodreads for ha ha's yesterday about word count and they said: "no can do".
I kinda like the "first printed edition" as the baseline for page count. If we want to do a tweak for YA/Mid-Grade font size similarly to how we handle graphic novels, that makes some sense for next year.
Ok nuff said, back to attempting to listen to Tower Lord while I yell at a developer in prose for having mangled a huge and old sycamore tree that they were specifically required as part of their approval not to touch when building their strip-commercial crappy development. (Nah, I'm not angry at all).
idiffer wrote: "I'm horsing around. I'll delete it"I'm just jealous 'cause I didn't think of it first ;)
Rob, could you elaborate on the "no can do"? Do they not want the stat to be available?
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I assume their reasoning is that there's very little regulation on word count... page count is easy since books come with page numbers...
Page counts come from author posts... may or may not include front material ans the like if someone just copied an ebook into a work counter... half the time publishers just release an estimate of pages TIMES arbitrary number...
At least that's what I learned when I google'd it a few weeks ago...
On another topic, what did idiffer do?... What is this 10,000 page book?... Is it that Wildbow serial novel from his website?
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I think me, Siobhan, and everybody who spent all of Sunday in the Venting and Random chatter threads, could use some easy points like that...
:D
Fantasy Buddy Reads
Books mentioned in this topic
Gardens of the Moon (other topics)Tower Lord (other topics)
White Sand, Volume 2 (other topics)
Dead Until Dark (other topics)
The Warrior's Apprentice (other topics)
More...
I'll fiddle with merging the content when I have some time... want to continue reading for now... already wasted too much of my morning eating and watching youtube clips...