: Re: Should all books have page numbers? 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

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.

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: Re: Should all books have page numbers? 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

More posts by @Sims2267584

: How to write a scene from multiple peoples perspectives? I want to write a scene from multiple peoples perspectives without making it incredibly long, or repetitive. Is there a correct way

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: Should I use a disclaimer in my novel? I recently finished writing my first novel. Many of the characters resemble people in real life, and they are not always portrayed in a flattering manner.

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