Tell me, how many pages are in an audiobook? How do you determine that? Would you even want to? Well, let me tell you that Goodreads equates hours to page numbers. At 10 hours 6 minutes according to Audible, Cinder by Marissa Meyer has 11 pages. Goodreads mandates that you round up the hour, not down. The 400 pages in the hardcover edition are of little concern to Goodreads.
Hours Aren’t Pages
I think it’s laughable that instead of adopting the number of pages from the hardcover, the standard practice is to reduce hours to pages. If you’re aware of this quirk, you do learn that the “page numbers” actually indicate listening hours. Not everyone knows this though. I only found out because I was a librarian and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to input audiobook lengths. It’s not uncommon for non-linrarians to ask why the page numbers are so low on audiobooks.
Skewed Reading Statistics
The cool thing about keeping your reading log on Goodreads is that there’s an overview on reading statistics. How many books did you read each year? Which book is the longest you read in a given year? How do your book ratings stack up each year? You can also see how many pages you’ve read every year.
There’s a huge problem with tracking the number of pages read every: the statistics mix all formats. This means that 600-word tome that you listened to as an audiobook will be reduced to 17 pages. That is a difference of 583 pages! They don’t count on Goodreads. There’s no way to separate pages read and hours listened to. Since more than a third of the 42 books I’ve read this year were audiobooks, the page count is effectively redundant.
Measuring Lengths of Books
You would think figuring out the page count of ebooks would be the troubling endeavour. Depending on the screen size of a reading device, page numbers of ebooks are relative. For the most part I’ve observed that Goodreads users refer to the page numbers of the first esition hardcover. I think that makes sense. It’s a good indicator of how much you can expect to read.
Yet for audiobooks that have a fixed length, Goodreads doesnt acknowledge this. They don’t give Goodreads librarians the option to specifically input hours and minutes. Personally, I think it’s important information that Goodreads doesn’t deal with well at all.
Goodreads is not audible dot com or dot de, they are nothing compared to the amazon slushpile.
Thank You! I had to Google “Why aren’t page numbers listed for audiobooks” and this post came up. It did explain to me the seemingly random small numbers of “PAGES” listed on GoodReads audiobooks. I do really like to showcase the actual edition (audio, Kindle or physical) but I do really like to have all my page numbers added for an annual comparison. I never thought I’d get into audiobooks, but they have their advantages (being able to “read” (listen) while doing other things (cleaning, exercising, driving, even watching my son’s basketball games … although I admit distraction is easy)and I’ve found that often the narrators and their voices really add elements my imagination wouldn’t have come up with (accents, etc).
As this post is a couple years old and STILL no changes on GoodReads … I hold out little hope that there will be changes :(
Huh. That conversion rate is pretty weird… but personally, I don’t find it a big deal. I’m not too concerned about pages on Goodreads, but if I were I’d probably just classify the audiobook as a paperback. I mean, you’ve done the reading (sort of) and know the storyline, so you HAVE read it… what’s the matter with a little twist of the truth here and there?
Beth x
I did had an idea that this was happening and it is annoying. That is why I don’t add the audiobook editions of what I read. I will usually just use the hardcover edition so I can count the number of pages and I have an audiobook shelf so I know that I read that as an audiobook. But it would be a lot better if Goodreads actually knew how to compute the audio pages…
That sounds simply dumb. Oh yes Goodreads, it takes me nearly eleven hours to read eleven pages. This is so, so dumb, and it’s so laughable. I just can’t.
If only they would admit how ridiculous that even is.
Huh, I didn’t know that about the page count. When I add books on Goodreads, I usually add audiobooks by selecting the regular physical book. If I cared about keeping them separate and categorized the pagecount issue would really annoy me though.
I tend to pick the exact edition that I’m reading or want to obtain on Goodreads, so little things like that matter to me. Haha.
I knew about this, mainly because I’m a librarian myself. Since I don’t listen to audiobooks, it doesn’t concern me directly, but I think it’s just another feature that has to be altered/properly added. It really should be right on top of the to do list next to the reread feature (at least they are looking into the latter although it still might take ages).
When I first joined Goodreads I had no idea since I rarely listened to audiobooks back then. As my listening habits picked up though and I learnt about this system, I thought it was just a temporary technical fix until they would implement listening lengths. It irks me that it still hasn’t happened after all these years. You’re right, at least they’re finally discussing how to best go about documenting rereads.
I had no idea about this method until this post as I don’t listen to audiobooks but still… I’m very puzzled. While I understand the idea of having a conversion scale between pages and time in an audiobook, I don’t understand why the particular 1 hour = 1 page conversion was chosen? That just doesn’t make sense to me at all. 1 page hardly takes 1 hour to read… wouldn’t minutes make more sense? And that wouldn’t be that hard to calculate. If you have the number of hours, all you need to do is multiply by 60. But anyhow, I think either way there is this question of needing a standard for a length of a book on Goodreads. I’ve been reading a lot of eBooks which has reduced my page count a lot.
Yep, that’s the sad state of audiobook documentation on Goodreads. Well, as much as 1 hour = 1 page is too little, 1 hour = 100 pages would means 610 pages for the audiobook of Cinder. That’s rather excessive as well. Haha. The best way really would be to separate page numbers from listening lengths.
When I read ebooks and see that the page count hasn’t been keyed into the system, I refer to hardcover’s page count and add that to the ebook edition. Not that it matters much for my GR stats anyway, seeing how audiobooks have resulted in a gross underrepresentation of the page I’ve read this year. Meh.