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(Answered) Policy for public domain ebooks with no page numbers?
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Lauren
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Oct 30, 2023 04:38PM
I read a lot of ebooks from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, but the editions on GR never have page numbers because the "publishers" don't state a page number. Is there any way around this?
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Corinne wrote: "For ebooks we can use pdf page count because that is a pretty stable number across devices. So ones that can be downloaded as pdf that is an easy answer.It's recommended that Librarian's note whe..."
Neither PG nor SE have pdf downloads as an option, unfortunately.
As they are digitized from public domain print copies, can the page count of the source scans be used?
you can just leave that part of the entry blank - unless you need it for something specifically
Dee wrote: "you can just leave that part of the entry blank - unless you need it for something specifically"Thanks for responding! I'm not a librarian, but am asking as a reader who reads a lot of public domain Gutenberg ebooks—I never actually log the Gutenberg editions because they have no associated page numbers, which messes up my end-of-year reading stats. Is there a way that page numbers could be found/calculated/added?
no real easy way - because even pages on kindle are based on bits of information in a location - which changes depending on any kind of html mark-up etc...
Two ideas:1) I opened the PG page for "Platonism in English poetry" and then selected the "read online (web)" option (note I'm doing this on a desktop browser, not mobile).
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...
On the right hand side of the page, there are small boxes that indicate the page number. Platonism appears to have 242 pages total. So if the page count is available, you could ask a Librarian to add the count here on GR and include this URL as your source.
Unfortunately not all books appear to have this feature. For example, "Jack Heaton gold seeker" does not.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...
That leads me to idea #2.
2) Take the book's "read online (web)" URL and plug it into a "word counter" site, such as:
https://wordcounter.net/website-word-...
https://www.thehoth.com/word-count/
These both returned word counts around 51,000 for Jack Heaton. Take that number and divide by 250. (I got this "magic number" by googling "average number of words per page" and picking the value that showed up most often in the search results.)
So 51k / 250 = 204 pages for Jack Heaton.
Obviously this method is not going to be 100% accurate due to differences in font, text size, line spacing, text formatting, and the number of images. But it should get you somewhere in the ballpark, and doing the math is acceptable according to the page count page in the Librarian's manual.
For best chances in getting these edits into the site, you will want to do the legwork of getting the word count and calculating page count, and provide your sources/formula for reference in your forum post.
Hope this helps. :)
gem wrote: "and doing the math is acceptable according to the page count page in the Librarian's manual..."Fantastic, that's just what I wanted to know! I didn't realize this was already addressed in the manual. Thanks so much.
You're welcome. Feel free to put a bunch of page count requests into one post in the "Page Numbering Requests" section and comment here with the link, and I can take care of them for ya.
