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Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Making the Sausage: Book Length

You may find this hard to believe, but I'm a bit of a nerd.

I like to make spreadsheets to plan things out.  I've already discussed the spreadsheets I use to track my agent queries and review requests.  Similarly, I'm a slave to my Pokemon Go spreadsheet (it lets me know which Pokemon should be evolved, which need to be walked, and so forth.)

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to get a head up on my Goodreads reading challenge for 2018.  It's been five years since the Hundie Challenge when I read the Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century (according to The Modern Library.)

The last few years I said fuck it and read at the rate and pace I felt like.  Needless to say, I did not read much.  So this year I decided a challenge might make a dent in my TBR pile and make me feel better about how illiterate I am.  But by the end of February I was already way, way behind.  So I decided to make a spreadsheet of the Kindle books I own and sort them by length.  I figured I could knock out a bunch of the shorter books, thus seriously making inroads into the length of my TBR pile, if not the volume necessarily.

As I was attempting to sort my Kindle TBR pile by length, I noticed something.  I had no idea how to sort it by length.  I've explained in the past how books are measured by word length, because 500 words could be a 30-page children's book or a single page of an unillustrated adult novel.  Depending on formatting, books of the same length in words can vary by sometimes hundreds of pages.  I knew this, but I figured it wouldn't be terribly hard for someone to determine the length of his Kindle books.

Boy was I wrong.

Let's take a look at a short sample of my spreadsheet, shall we?

Title PP
CUT CORNERS 32
THE ELDER UNEARTHED 85
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH ZOMBIES 97
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS 99
SQUABBIT FARM 101
GAMELAND 130
DOWN 139
UNDEAD 154
THE KERES STRAIN 155

In this instance I've sorted the TBR list by page length, per Amazon.  But I know pages are based on formatting, so I squinted and took at look at the Kindle "location" length.  Here's what I came up with:

Title Location PP
CUT CORNERS 406 32
FANTASTIC EARTH DESTROYER ULTRA PLUS 650 255
SQUABBIT FARM 1099 101
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS 1462 99
THE WANING 2068 183
LUST, MONEY & MURDER 2323 278
THE HORROR SQUAD 2441 278
HE LEFT HER AT THE ALTAR 2508 168
SACRIFICE 2540 180

Hmm.  Not quite the same is it?  So then I thought to myself, perhaps there is some kind of ratio between location and page length.  Once I had that ratio I could simply multiply that number by the page length and get the actual lengths of every book in my pile.  But a quick attempt to do so determined that was not the case:

Title Location PP
CUT CORNERS 406 32 12.69
FANTASTIC EARTH DESTROYER ULTRA PLUS 650 255 2.55
SQUABBIT FARM 1099 101 10.88
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS 1462 99 14.77
THE WANING 2068 183 11.30
LUST, MONEY & MURDER 2323 278 8.36
THE HORROR SQUAD - 2441 2441 278 8.78
HE LEFT HER AT THE ALTAR 2508 168 14.93
SACRIFICE 2540 180 14.11

The ratios ranged from 2.5 to 23.8.  Basically, that's useless.  Even an average of the ratios would be useless.  So here I had been thinking that Kindle "locations" were independent of formatting - but they are not.  But I was not out of data yet.  So next I decided to sort by the length of time it takes to read.  Surely that would get me to the center of this Tootsie Pop.

Title Length in minutes Location PP
CUT CORNERS                              30 406 32
FANTASTIC EARTH DESTROYER ULTRA PLUS                               30 650 255
SQUABBIT FARM 78 1099 101
HE LEFT HER AT THE ALTAR 116 2508 168
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS 117 1462 99
THE ELDER UNEARTHED 123 85
THE MYTH OF FALLING 146 188
THE WANING 150 2068 183
LUST, MONEY & MURDER 164 2323 278
Um...no.  That's when I realized that the length of time it takes to read a Kindle book is not some independent, objective time.  It must be based on an average of the length of time it took every reader which Kindle collected information on to read.  So very popular books would have different average read lengths from very unpopular books.  And books which are easy to read would have very different lengths from denser books.

At this point I was starting to tear my hair out.  As you can see, a few of the regular suspects kept cropping up, so I could guess that CUT CORNERS, for instance, was going to be a quick read no matter what.  But otherwise the books in my TBR pile varied so much by page length, time to read, and location length, that I had no idea what the hell constituted "short" anymore.

But one more vital statistic called to me.  I noticed that ever kindle book has a series of dots under it.  And I guessed that those dots represented content.  FANTASTIC EARTH DESTROYER ULTRA PLUS, for instance, is a somewhat lengthy book at 255 pp, but it is illustrated, so its actual content of words is very small.  Pulling out a magnifying glass I set to the laborious task (yes, as I stated at the outset, I am a nerd) of counting dots.  And here's what I came up with:

Title Location PP Dots
FANTASTIC EARTH DESTROYER ULTRA PLUS 650 255 3
SQUABBIT FARM 1099 101 3
CUT CORNERS 406 32 3
THE ELDER UNEARTHED 85 4
KINGDOM OF SHADOWS 1462 99 4
THE MYTH OF FALLING 188 6
THE WANING 2068 183 6
DOWN 139 7
REMORSELESS 203 7
Now that looks a bit more like it.

So what's the moral of this story?  I don't fucking know.  I just thought it might be interesting to look at how hard it is to determine the actual lengths of books, particularly on Kindle.  Remember the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover?"  Similarly, I suppose we should not judge a book by its width.

2 comments:

  1. Damn you! (in a good way) Being a fellow spreadsheet junkie to track everything and anything, I thought I ought to be able to figure this out. I spent about 45 minutes trying to determine page count on the Kindle. Couldn't do it. There's probably a way if I could get the right API to programmatically look at the list but Amazon probably has that disabled for the public.

    However, I went back to the heart of the question/problem: determining the shortest books on your list so that you can knock those off your TBR list. And I found a solution.

    Goodreads.

    1. Make sure your TBR list has been entered into Goodreads. You can import your Amazon purchases if that helps.
    2. Go to My Books, click your Want To Read list. In that top row above the header, click Settings and check "num pages"
    3. In the list below, now sort by Num Pages. Other than some books that for whatever reason come up as Unknown, you should be able to see the shortest.

    Yes, it's not in a spreadsheet under your complete control but it does give you the info. And it has the extra bonus of working for physical books as well. Provided you enter their data manually.

    Conversely I'm now a little scared by THE PASSAGE and THE FIREMAN. The two longest books on my list which are both over 700 pages.

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    Replies
    1. Hey, good stuff! That's a pro tip I could use. Thanks, Mike!

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