1wcbryantpaganlib
Who comes up with the publication information and determines the page counts? When you search a book and it inserts information for a book say Foraging the Ozarks: Finding, Identifying, and Preparing Edible Wild Foods in the Ozarks the pagination comes up with 256 pages. If you flip to the back of the book, it only has 230 pages including the author page. Where in the world are these other 26 pages supposed to be?
2AnnieMod
>1 wcbryantpaganlib: The source you added the book from.
When you add a book in LT, it comes from a source, not from the record inside of LT. So if you had chosen Amazon.com from example when adding the book, the number comes from there.
PS: In such cases, especially with such random numbers, it is usually the full number of pages, not just the ones with the text - all pieces of paper used to create the book if you will. Or sometimes it is just an estimate that was never fixed.
When you add a book in LT, it comes from a source, not from the record inside of LT. So if you had chosen Amazon.com from example when adding the book, the number comes from there.
PS: In such cases, especially with such random numbers, it is usually the full number of pages, not just the ones with the text - all pieces of paper used to create the book if you will. Or sometimes it is just an estimate that was never fixed.
3MarthaJeanne
>1 wcbryantpaganlib: You entered Foraging the Ozarks: from Amazon.
4Charon07
From the info from other sources, it appears that Foraging the Ozarks has 26 pages of front matter, numbered i to xxvi, so that’s almost certainly where the other 26 pages are.
5paradoxosalpha
The pages field can have multiple lines, so you have the option of either staying with the 256-page count as reflecting the physical book; or you can add a line, select the Roman numerals for xvi pages in the first line, and Arabic numerals for 230 in the second, to get counts that fit the printed pagination.
6Blythewood
When I add books to my library and I find this "discrepancy," I just "update" it based on what I see in my copy of the book. Afterall, my library on LT is for me, so i get to "make the rules" governing my library.
7bnielsen
>4 Charon07: Beware that the tsv export file will have Page Count with "xxvi; 230 " in that case. It might take some programming skills to convert it into 256 in case you need a clean number. (The trailing blank in the Page Count field in the tsv export file is just a quirk, but not a show stopper, but the mix of Roman Numerals, semicolons and blanks might be)
8hipdeep
>7 bnielsen: I actually wrote up a long description of how to do this, but the TL;DR is "Excel could do 90% of this out of the box". (And that's about all I'm gonna post unless someone wants the blow-by-blow.)
The "text to columns" feature is great at splitting up delimited data like this; you just treat the semicolon as the delimiter. And then, it turns out Excel has an =ARABIC function built in for converting Roman numerals to Arabic numerals (and =ROMAN if you want to go the other way). And then you can just add them.
There is a little fiddling required to clean up your data, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Or yes, you could break out some programming-esque skills and write some IF statements, if that's easier than getting clean columns for "pages of front matter" and "pages of main text".
I'd never have learned about the ARABIC/ROMAN functions if you hadn't sent me down that rabbit hole, so (sincerely) thanks!
The "text to columns" feature is great at splitting up delimited data like this; you just treat the semicolon as the delimiter. And then, it turns out Excel has an =ARABIC function built in for converting Roman numerals to Arabic numerals (and =ROMAN if you want to go the other way). And then you can just add them.
There is a little fiddling required to clean up your data, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Or yes, you could break out some programming-esque skills and write some IF statements, if that's easier than getting clean columns for "pages of front matter" and "pages of main text".
I'd never have learned about the ARABIC/ROMAN functions if you hadn't sent me down that rabbit hole, so (sincerely) thanks!
9bnielsen
>8 hipdeep: Ah, nice. And yes, I've been down some rabbit holes like that too :-)
That reminds me that the original TeX book has some exercise about writing a macro that took as input a number n and should give n stars as output. The point of the exercise was to do so without running out of memory for the macro and the winner was to take n, append 000, call a built-in function to turn it into Roman Numerals, i.e. giving n large M's, and then converting M to *. Not exactly the first idea to cross my mind :-)
That reminds me that the original TeX book has some exercise about writing a macro that took as input a number n and should give n stars as output. The point of the exercise was to do so without running out of memory for the macro and the winner was to take n, append 000, call a built-in function to turn it into Roman Numerals, i.e. giving n large M's, and then converting M to *. Not exactly the first idea to cross my mind :-)
