Adding Pagination to the E-Book

This fall semester, I took an English course called The Future of the Book from Dr. David Blakesley. He runs his own academic publishing company, Parlor Press, and he has a lot of really cool ideas about how the book will evolve in future years.

One of the complaints brought up several times by my classmates was that e-book readers like Amazon's Kindle do not have page numbers. This makes them downright impossible to use for any sort of scholarly work; without page numbers, referencing citations is a tricky endeavor at best. Dr. Blakesley is correct, I think, when he says that digital editions are meant to be separate from their print brethren, and that the citation systems will evolve to complement them eventually. That will be great when it happens, but it doesn't help students now.

I decided to add page numbers to the open source EPUB format. By extending an open-source, JavaScript-based EPUB reader - found online at Google Code - I was able to insert the page numbers to a common paperback edition into the electronic edition of Charles Dickens' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In discussion-based seminars, this could be an invaluable resource for e-book-using students. "Okay class, turn to page 235 in the text..."

Check out my demo.
Press 'n' to scroll down and press 'p' to scroll up. Move your cursor over the icon to see the page number and edition information.