Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Books currently have a “number of pages” metric; however, for fanfictions and some kinds of ebooks, this metric does not exist because they are not published in pages.

While those are a corner case, perhaps using word count as optional metric for book size, and/or chapter count as optional metric for both book size (although to a lesser extent) and reading progress (much more usable here) might make sense.

Just a suggestion from what I saw while still waiting for my new librarian application to be processed. Hi, anyway, I hope I can help organising data here (especially for German books).

If a book only has the word count listed, we add it to the description. The database cannot handle word count in the page count field.

Also if it is an audio file, we use the page count field and use the hours listed. So a 12 hour audio file is listed as 12 pages.

Also as a note for the future, this relates to site functionality and should be listed in the Feedback Group rather than here. We librarians have no control over site functionality.

Hm yes, I _was_ suggesting a change to the database structure, not to add it in the page count field. Perhaps renaming page_count to count and add an enum count_type (page (default), chapters, hours) or something.

Thanks for the hint about the description field, and sorry for this ending up in the wrong forum. What do you suggest; can this be moved, or should I re-post in the correct forum?

Threads cannot be moved to another group, but I think this also has to do with librarian policies (more than site functionality).

In theory, we could fill in anything we liked in the page count field (Sandra already mentioned the "page count" of audiobooks).

And we are allowed to use tools to estimate the page count of ebooks.

ETA Ah, I see you did mean a change to the database structure. I misread it :)

Hm, as long as everyone uses the same estimate calculation, I guess… but I’d really prefer (also from a GR user PoV) the site to handle this.

mirabilos you need to repost this in the Feedback Group :)

Thanks Sandra, posted here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks to everyone for the nice feedback and getting me to think about it. I ended up not suggesting to use word count as a metric but keep the existing practice of, at best, mentioning it in the description.

mirabilos wrote: "Hm, as long as everyone uses the same estimate calculation, I guess… but I’d really prefer (also from a GR user PoV) the site to handle this."

FWIW, it shouldn't be any old estimate. Per the manual it's ok using a tool like Calibre's page count, which uses the same algorithm as Adobe Digital Editions - where most publishers get a page count for ebooks and e-readers like Nook use it too.