Well, the point is to preserve the pagination in the print book. If page
1 starts on page 15 you have to preserve that pagination even if it is
an annoyance. And it is an annoyance. I thought that back when I was
fully sighted and was reading print books. It has always seemed to me
that page 1 should start on page 1. But that's not the way the
publishers saw it. It is a practice that has been going on long enough
that it is a tradition, for the pages that come before the Arabic
numbered pages to be numbered in lower case Roman numerals. If that is
how the actual print book has them then you are following the way that
book was printed to include them that way. If they are unnumbered in the
print book I suppose Bookshaere needs some kind of page numbers for
navigation purposes and just follows that tradition. It is the text that
we are not supposed to change and that has to do with copyright. Page
numbers have to do with formatting the book and are not copyrighted.
There can be certain changes in that to conform to Bookshare formatting
standards, but insofar as the book is already numbered it is necessary
to preserve that. If you are in a classroom, for example, and the
teacher says to turn to some page you will want everyone to be on the
same page. It is also important to have those page numbers correct for
citations if you are writing a research paper or otherwise making
reference to the book.
On 10/29/2016 3:54 AM, Cindy Rosenthal wrote:
I've just spent a few hours changing pages that precede the main text of a book to lower case Roman numerals. Originally I'd numbered them with Arabic numbers to end up with p. 21 which is the page on which Chapter 1 is.
Why, since the book has Arabic page numbers do we have use Roman numerals for preceding pages? I thought we're not supposed to do things differently from the print book
Cindy
