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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

Based on that article having your table of contents at the end of the book is probably trying to scam more pages. Obviously Amazon needs to fix their page accounting system but taking advantage of it in this way is pretty awful and his books should be removed until they are fixed.

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For what it's worth, it used to be pretty standard to put the ToC at the back of the book when making epub and mobi files.

We did it at Leanpub, and I'm pretty sure we were just following what the Prags and (if I remember correctly) O'Reilly were doing.

The reason was that opening an epub and flipping through a long ToC before you get to the book is really annoying. There is a way to set the "starting page" in epubs, but many ebook readers ignored this at the time and just opened at the title-page, so putting the ToC at the end was just a better reader experience.

Now that most e-readers use the start-page setting properly, ToCs are mostly at the beginning of ebooks.

I never knew this, thanks for the insight and history behind this approach.

In WJW's case it's based on traditional aesthetics: he writes novels, he doesn't want to omit the ToC completely but he expects readers to want to start with the text itself rather than wading through pages of ToCs.

(Trust me on this: I've known him in meatspace for about 15 years and he's simply not technically-minded enough to be trying to game the system: he's a novelist, not a programmer.)

For extra fun: table-of-contents at the end is the convention for French books.

Given that Kindle Unlimited is available in France (according to http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...), I wonder what they do...

I really don't think he was trying to scam 1 more page read in books that probably number at least 300 pages...

It's not about the number of pages—if the ToC was moved to the beginning, the total count would be the same—it's about having people skip to the last page to look at the ToC even if they don't plan to finish the book.

Why would people skip to the last page to look at ToC of a novel? He put it there so people don't have to look at it.

Read the article on how the scam works.

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