Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Robert H. Jackson: Country Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, America's Advocate
This topic is about Robert H. Jackson
11 views
Page Numbering Requests > Requesting correction to page count

Comments Showing 1-4 of 4 (4 new)    post a comment »
dateUp arrow    newest »

message 1: by Scott (new) - added it

Scott (snoveck) | 2 comments Robert H. Jackson: Country Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, America's AdvocateI have a copy of “Robert H. Jackson: Country Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, America's Advocate" by Eugene C. Gerhart, a book originally published in 1958 and reprinted in 2003. Goodreads incorrectly reports the page count as 184 pages for the 2003 edition and zero for the 1958 edition. According to the publisher (https://www.wshein.com/catalog/12169/), the original 1958 edition is 748 pages. According to online sources indexed by Google Books (https://www.google.com/books/edition/...), the 2003 edition is 729 pages. I have the 2003 edition here in hand, and can report that it is paginated up to page 545 (the end of the index), then has 148 pages of separately paginated appendix material (starting over at 1 and ending at 148), plus around 30 pages of prefatory material and unnumbered pages that probably add up to the reported total of 729 pages of material. I’m not sure whether the correct Goodreads policy is to use the count of 729 pages, or to count only the 545 pages of non-appendix numbered pages, or the 545+148 pages of numbered material (the main book and appendix but not the preface or unnumbered pages) — but any one of those counts would be considerably more accurate than the current listed figure of 184 pages, so I’m requesting that the page count be updated and corrected. Thank you, and please let me know if you need any additional information or confirmation from me.


message 2: by Jens (new)

Jens Raab | 103 comments Hey Scott!

Thanks for the detailed explanation, this is very helpful.

In you're interested, the relevant bits in the Librarian Manual says the following:
"The number of pages in a book is meant to include all content except for advertisements and preview chapters for other books. Included end material may include acknowledgments, afterwords, appendices, bibliographies, glossaries, indexes, notes, and suggested discussion questions.
Introductory material paged using roman numerals is not included in the total page count."
and
"There might be rare instances where page numbering restarts in different sections within a single book [...]. In these cases, the page count should, where available, be the sum total of the page numbers listed at the end of each section."

So in this case, this would mean that the 545+148 option is the one according to GR rules. (Personally, I think that the unnumbered pages should count, and blank pages should not, but I'm not the one who made the rules...)
Anyway, I've updated the page count to 693.


message 3: by Scott (new) - added it

Scott (snoveck) | 2 comments Thank you very much! I’ll stay out of any debate on what the policy should be, but I’m glad to help provide a more accurate count than the inaccurate number that had been sourced previously. Thanks again!


message 4: by Jens (new)

Jens Raab | 103 comments Didn't mean to draw you into a debate about policy! ;-)
And as you said, the original 148 were way off the mark.

A lot of the information is directly imported from the respective Amazon product page, I think, but in this case the page number given there is not even 148 but 184.
Not sure what's going on with this book! 😅


back to top