I don’t have a Kindle or any form of E-Book, but was wondering…
If I read a normal book, obviously I can tell when I am getting towards the end of the book, as, well, I can see there are only a few pages left.
But when reading an E-Book of any sort, and without flipping ahead or counting how many pages are left, do you ever get “surprised” when a book finishes? I mean, do you suddenly get to the last page and go, “Oh! It’s finished!”
Just wondering if it made the books perhaps more interesting by NOT knowing how many more pages you have to read.
I’ve never used an actual Kindle, but with the Kindle app on the Mac, there’s a little display in the corner that shows where you are in terms of percentage of the book.
On the Kindle there’s a bar at the bottom of the screen that fills up as you read. The bar also has little nibs that show where chapters start. And it has the % listed above the bar as well as Locations. Though I’m not sure what exactly the Locations are. An 850 page book has 14000 Locations.
On the Jetbook it shows the % of completion(to 2 decimal places even!) and has a little bar like the Kindle’s only vertical going down the side of the screen and shows what page# you are on and total pages. I’m not sure how exactly it estimates pages though. Each page is more text(I think more than twice as much) than can be displayed on the screen at once and the total page count comes in very close to, but not identical to, the amount of pages in a paperback version of the novel. I’d guess it’s probably based on word count or character count.
I’ve never been surprised that I came to the end of a book on the computer screen or on an ebook reader. Although I did once get surprised at the end of a physical book when it abruptly ended 30-40 pages before the book was over because of a little teaser of another of the author’s work at the back. None of the ebooks I’ve read have had such teasers yet.
I believe locations are simply lines. They depend on the font size you are viewing, so a book read in a smaller font will have fewer locations than if a larger font is selected.
I don’t have my Kindle on me, but I’m pretty sure this is incorrect. Changing the font size on the Kindle has no effect on the number of locations in a book. The locations are (seemingly) arbitrarily sized markers in the book, and can differ in relative “size” between books in the same series published by the same publisher.
They may not all have the “nibs”, but they all have the progress bar, so you always know how far in the book you are just by looking at the bottom of the screen.
Oops, sorry, it was indeed incorrect. I guess I was confused by the fact that the number of locations on a page decreases when the font size is increased–which is rather obvious.
There’s a little bar, which generally tells you where you are. Where I’m surprised is when there’s a book with a lot of footnotes or other matter at the back, but then that gets me sometimes IRL.
The nook has a bar at the bottom also. It also will display what page out of the total number of pages you are on. I don’t know how it determines pages, though.
I have downloaded the Kindle for Blackberry free app. and am using it quite a bit. Never thought I’d like e-book readers, but as I was already used to fondling the Blackberry non-stop, e-books sneaked in through the PDA/smartphone backdoor . . .
Kindle BB also has the percentage/graphic bar others have referenced.
I have a Sony Reader. across the bottom of the display it tells you how much battery power is remaining, the font size, the page number you are reading and the total number of pages.