Does My Kindle Book Have Real Page Numbers?

A book viewed in Page Flip mode.

A book viewed in Page Flip mode.

August 23, 2016 – Update: Amazon recently introduced a feature that takes real page numbers to a whole new level. The feature is called Page Flip. It allows you to “step back” from the page you are currently reading on Kindle or Kindle Reader and navigate around the book without ever losing your place. You can view your exact position in a book and see real page numbers at the bottom of each page. Then, you can browse to other pages, and jump back to your original starting point in you wish. This is a major structural improvement to the reading experience on the Kindle. Learn more at Amazon HERE.

To find out if your Kindle book has page numbers, remember that this feature is available only on Kindle 3 and later. It is also only available if the publisher of the book went to the time and expense of adding real page numbers into the Kindle book file.

If you have a Kindle 3 or later, tap the Menu button to open up Menu View and look in the lower left hand part of the screen. If your book has real page numbers, you will see them there.

connelly real page numbers

Click to view page

If you want to know if a book you are thinking of purchasing has real page numbers, go to the listing for the book in the Kindle Store as the listing for the print book in the main book store will not have this information. On the listing page for the book in the Kindle Store, look below the title information for a bullet or two, and one of them may say that the book contains “Contains Real Page Number” following the page number count. If you click the little drop down menu at the end of that line, you will see which version of the print book has been used to provide the page numbers, identified by ISBN number. Remember, the page numbers will only track with that edition, so if you are using this feature for scholarly purposes, get the bibliographic information for that edition only. Click on the image to see an example of this information on a page at Amazon.

Remember, page numbers relate to only one edition of the print book, so using this function to hide the fact from your teacher or professor that you are reading an e-book rather than the print version is risky. Better to learn how to cite an e-book than to use the page number function to emulate a print book citation. See article link below for how to cite an e-book.

Recommended for you: Kindle Fire HD: The Missing Manual

Related Content: Page Number versus Position on the Kindle and Why is it So Hard to Cite a Passage on the Kindle?



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