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I am interested in whether there are any compelling reasons why print books should always have page numbers. In particular, I am thinking of books comprising many elements that are each typically smaller than a page and each entry is itself numbered.
I am compiling a reference book of historical source material, which will be self-published. It will comprise approximately 2,000 short excerpts from eighteenth-century newspapers that have relevance to a particular field. The excerpts are ordered chronologically, with typically 2 to 10 excerpts per page, each one headed with a sequential number (followed by the date and source). The book has a detailed index where readers can look up which excerpts relate to a specific topic but, unlike most indexes, the cross-references point to the excerpt numbers rather than page numbers (since this is more specific than making the reader scour an entire page in search of the relevant sentence or paragraph). My feeling is, therefore, that also numbering the pages complicates matters unnecessarily.
However, my experience is that reference books of this type do always explicitly number the pages, so I am wondering if there are good reasons for that. For example, I have a few naturalist field guides that are like this. In one guide to African birds, there are entries for 600 different species, presented 2 per page, with each entry sequentially numbered. Thus, the index entry "Barn owl: 203" is ambiguous; is the barn owl covered in species account number 203 (on page 112), or is the species account for barn owls on page 203? Unfortunately, I have field guides with indexes of both types, so sometimes I find myself guessing wrongly which system they have used and taking twice as long to look something up.
My goal is for my book to be as streamlined and user-friendly as possible, which is why I am interested in the pros and cons of page numbering in situations where explicit page numbers seem superfluous and potentially introduce ambiguity/complexity. My question, then, is whether there are situations like this when it is acceptable not to number pages.
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Page numbers, with or without index, are primarily used to secure the reader, so (s)he knows nothing is missing.
If you have a book/stack of papers, with page numbers 1-2-3-5-7-8-9, you instantly know, you are missing two pages, and you can (with relative ease) see that page 1 is the beginning and page 9 is the last page.
Without page numbers, you might not know, if paragrafs line up.
You need pointers. But when they are inherent in the content, and self-indexing, I'm going to stick my neck out and say no, you don't necessarily need page numbers. We manage very well without them in eBooks.
I'm not impressed by the argument that printers would muddle up the pages without them. My experience with printers is that they reproduce the PDF you send them, and their machines don't spew out piles of individual pages that could potentially get out of order. And you could always number pages in the area outside the crop marks, if you felt it necessary.
An academic reference can quote the pointer just as easily as a page number. "British Prime Ministers. OUP 2017. 'Churchill'" is just as useful as "British Prime Ministers. OUP 2017. p.27"
From the other answers it seems clear that, perhaps unfortunately, you need to use page numbers, at least in print. And you don't want to connect the excerpt numbers to page numbers, to allow different editions with the same excerpt numbers.
So why not make it easy to distinguish both uses of numbers? I mean, whenever you use a page number you write p87 (including in the footer or header of each page), and whenever you use an excerpt number you write ex103. Or something similar.
If you do that consistently throughout, then things should be clear (and perhaps a bit ugly, but not too ugly I think).
If you are ever going to print the book then page numbers are essential for Librarians, Archivists, Academics, Researchers and a lot of people who interact with the physical object of the book.
e.g. This is the 2018 edition 603 pages and XXII pages of indicia.
The other reason for page numbers is to identify if someone rips a page out of your book. Vandalism happens.
If your only editions will be electronic then "page" numbers are best left off and you can stick to your excerpt numbers. Unless you'll make it available as a PDF with images/pages locked. A PDF which allows text reflow is just like any other ebook/database format.
Bibles have page numbers even when nobody refers to them. Actually beginners are often told a page number so they can catch up quickly.
I hate Chapter+Section indexes - how far forward from 2-15 is 3-30?
Tips for Printed Volumes
I used to be a Book Publisher in a previous life.
If you don't want to list both page and excerpt numbers in your index because it becomes too big or unmanageable, print the most useful one (probably excerpt). Then make page number index available as a free download.
You will make a mistake somewhere in 2000 excerpts so make your errata available too. If you run print on demand, then I suggest version control so customers can determine which edition of the reference they have.
@Michael Kjörling pointed out in a comment errata indexed primarily by excerpt may be the most useful way to do it. That way, the errata would be equally useful regardless of what format of the book a reader may have, and the reader is likely already looking at the excerpt so have the excerpt number right in front of them.
Having page numbers makes quality control easier for printed books. In any random or pseudo random group of people you will have a variation of intelligence. This is demonstrably true of pressmen. Some of them are stupid. some are mean or like to pretend to be stupid, so if your book has page numbers you are much less likely to have pages out of order and much easier to fix if it happens.
Having page numbers for ebooks is just annoying. Don't believe me? try changing your font size. What happened to your page numbers? Does the second chapter start on the same page number? Should it?
It sounds you are mostly concerned about page numbers getting confused with entry numbers.
One way you could rectify this – assuming your book has chapters – is to number the excerpts with a dot notation using the chapter number first. Thus, Chapter 1 would have Excerpts 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, etc., and Chapter 2 would start with Excerpt 2.1, then continue with 2.2, 2.3, etc.
If you really want to make your book as "user-friendly as possible", I'd recommend including page numbers. People are used to referencing page numbers; if I saw something in your book that I wanted to show someone else, I'd probably be mildly irked that I couldn't just make a mental note of a page number like I do with virtually all my other books.
Pages are the unit by which users manipulate physical books. Personally I hate books that are indexed in anything other than page numbers. Even if your excerpt sizes are extremely consistent I'll still hate you for making me do math in my head (there are about 6 excerpts per page, so to find excerpt 1397 I should turn to approximately page...uh...hrm.) If you tell me that I want excerpt 1397 and it's on page 246 then I have a good intuition about where it is within the book.
If you have many short pieces on a page and nice clear headers (or excerpt numbers in the margins or whatever), then giving those in the index is nice (though optional). I have a book with the complete works of Shakespeare and I've often wished it had stanza numbers or something in the margins. But pages are the primary unit of print content and they are essential.
The Haynes auto manuals are a particularly bad example. They have sections ranging from a paragraph or two up to a full page or more. They don't have page numbers and it is absolutely infuriating trying to find something. If you say I can read about diagnosing the ignition module in Chapter 10 Section 19, I have to guess at where the chapter is within the book and even once I find part of the chapter I have to guess how many pages to turn to find the section I want. The situation there is exacerbated by poor typography: the section headers don't stand out as well as they could. But I've never seen a reference work indexed in something other than page numbers which was pleasant to use.
Yeah...this is a big pet peeve of mine, so...I tried to give examples and reasoning, but I apologize if I've still failed to make it something other than an opinion-based rant. Feel free to edit or whatever.
I remember that some Gamebooks didn't have page numbers, but excerpts numbers. Normally a book of the "Fighting Fantasy" series had 400 of these sequential excerpts, and you could easily find them by turning multiple pages and making an intuitive search.
So your answer is: No. Not all books should have page numbers.
Also, the concept of pages is becoming obsolete with the growth of digital books. You can choose your own font size and device to read, and this is incompatible with a fixed number of pages.
Nevertheless, if you're going for print books and want to avoid ambiguity, you could explicit it: "Barn owl: entry 203" or "Barn owl: page 112" or even "Barn owl: entry 203 (pp 112)".
If you want anyone with any academic pretensions (e.g. undergraduates, researchers) to cite your book you must include page numbers so that it can be easily referenced.
As well, I have used books that use section numbers rather than page numbers in indexes and they are really annoying -- how do you know where a section starts or ends?
Even if you don't intend to index your entries by page number, you'll annoy quite a few people if you omit page numbers.
Librarians, who need to file number of pages,
printers, who need page numbers to assemble the book from sheets,
archivists, who prepare digital copies and need page numbers for these,
...and so on.
Table of contents should always refer page numbers, but you're welcome to take liberties with the index; in particular, make it alphabetic - and you can use both systems:
131: Lion Abbey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
132: Lion Cathedral . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
284: Lipp Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .169
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