Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi there!
Respectfully, I would like to request that the current page numbering policy be revisited. The current policy has a few problems that make for the listed page counts to be potentially grossly misleading. Further, the current policy has statements that are in conflict. Particularly, "The number of pages in a book is meant to include all content except for advertisements and preview chapters for other books" and "Introductory material paged using roman numerals is not included in the total page count." are incompatible.

One of the genres in which this is most evident is classics or other scholarly works. These often have upwards of 100 pages of introductory material, often important and of excellent quality. For example, in such cases it would be ridiculous to list a book with 620 pages by the book numbering, but with 70 pages of introductory material as 620 pages. The more realistic count is 690.

For those of us who track pages read per year over year, this disparity grows greater over time. This also serves to reduce GoodReads' usefulness and accuracy over time as well.

I believe the spirit of the policy is to maintain a sensible and consistent policy that is easily understood. Currently that policy could be summed up by "the page count should match the last numbered page in the book." However as discussed, this does not reflect the whole situation as most books often have some amount of interdictory material.

My preference would be to count the first printed page as page 1, and every page between until the last printed page. If a reader reads every single printed page, this yields the correct count of the number of pages they read. However, as that may be a more difficult rule to be consistent with, a simpler variation might be to count every front and back page in a book, regardless of if it's printed or not. This would reflect the number of sheets in a book.

Again, I would like to at least open the discussion regarding updating the policy. Either of the two proposals I suggested in the paragraph above would provide a more accurate number for a user's "pages read" statistics than the current policy.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my request.

Policy suggestions should go to support. We're just volunteers.

Hi Scott!
Thank you for the reply! I didn't realize there was a support section. Can you point me in that direction?

Who actually sets (and enforces) policies like this?

Thank you!

At the bottom of the page click About and then Contact. They are the ones who set policy.