epublication fields

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FineWine
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epublication fields

Post by FineWine »

If 'epub' or 'ebook' (or any other electronic format) is chosen in the "Format" field then the "Pages" field automatically change to "Digital Size" field which represents the digital byte size of the epublication either in kilobytes KB or MB megabytes and the "Dimensions" field automatically remains a 'NON' or empty field.

OR you build into Bookpedia a new permanent field labelled "Size" or "Digital Size" or "File Size", different websites use different terms for the same meaning. My preference would be "Digital Size".

I suggest the "Pages" to "Digital Size" because though the publishers (iBooks, Kindle, etc) say there are ex number of pages in an epublication, if you adjust the font size then the page count alters accordingly and of course there are no dimensions size in a digital book so that field should not be able to be used.

This of course would make it interesting with the search plug-in's; how do you work out what term they are using for the digital size. Also there are different ISBN's for epublications.
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Conor
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Re: epublication fields

Post by Conor »

I prefer the idea of a new field for this data. As it might get confusing for some users to see both pages and size listed in the same field in the table view. What do you name the column, if the field has two types of data and how do you sort it? is 20 megabytes more than 18 pages?

DVDpedia will look at the attributes of the file on the disk when importing movies and fill in any custom field that is called "Megabytes". I have done the same for Bookpedia for new imported EPUBs and PDFs, so at least that information is there for new entires for those that have a custom field to name "Megabytes". There is no update from file command in Bookpedia, so I can't do it retroactively for already linked files, but something to explore. As want to do something similar with DVDpedia to better manage movie files.

I'll look at adding that for search plugins when I run into the information provided online. This way I will have an easy code path to flip once I add a new field for this info, simply removing the custom filed version.
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FineWine
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Re: epublication fields

Post by FineWine »

Thank you conor. All fair comments. I do prefer the team 'Digital Size' for the number of bytes for the new field for this data though.

Also noticed some sites that list ebooks use the term 'Words' meaning the total number of words in the publication. This then is a third indicator of publication size. (Pages, Digital size, Words) So perhaps another new field.

More and more authors are either using epublication's as an additional publication outlet or, MORE IMPORTANTLY, their ONLY publication outlet. As I have mentioned in previous posts (Goodreads Search Plug-in and eBook Search Sites) it is a pity that epublication sites like these are not coming to the party to help cataloguing programs like Bookpedia. I am also presuming that there would be huge difficulties in culling data from Apple's iBook store!

Cheers
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