A New Chart Tracking Page Numbers

We've just added a new chart in the Pages area of your Charts & Graphs section, tracking top books by page number!



Now you can see your longest books, and compare page numbers between them.

We've also added the number of books to the title hover on the other charts, so when you look at them, in addition to the number of pages, you'll also see how many books are in a given series, or are by a particular author.

Come check yours out here: https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/bypages

Many thanks to Lucy / @knerd.knitter for her work on this!

>1 AbigailAdams26: Really neat! Thanks!

>1 AbigailAdams26: Whoa, that gave me some actionable results. Let's get real: No way I'm really going to read that much David Foster Wallace, digital or not. Deleted the madness.

Now my top result is what I expected. I went through a phase where I read almost everything written by Edward Abbey.

Informative and thank you!

Cool!

Love it,thank you

>3 DebiCates: Unlike you, my actionable result was 'better crack open Pratchett next if you're going to read those 20000+ pages in this lifetime'. :D

>3 DebiCates: It doesn’t take many titles for David Foster Wallace to feature prominently!

I didn’t have many surprises, except for Stephen King. Though I guess his books tend to be pretty thick.

Oh, this is fun!

I've been thinking since the 2025 In Review that I should do an audit of weird page count/dimensions data at some point, and this will help with that.

By the way, what is this magic?

MEMBERNAME

That could be very helpful in sharing links of that ilk with others so they get their own results, not yours...maybe?

>5 SandraArdnas: >6 Charon07: My top 7 authors did not surprise me. The 8th, I didn't even recognize the author, Charles Harrison. Who the....

Oh, it's ONE massive book, one I have for reference, not a sit down and read through. 1,300 pages on Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. I got to take a couple of deep breaths even before picking it up.

>8 DebiCates: If you substitute "MEMBERNAME" for any part of a LibraryThing url that would normally have your username, it will be universal, and everyone who clicks on the url will be taken to their version of that page.

>10 AbigailAdams26: That's the exact magic I hope you'd say it was. Thanks!

Ooh, this is a lot of fun (almost dangerously so)!

And like >5 SandraArdnas:, I have a lot of Terry Pratchett. In fact, he has nearly three times the amount of pages as the next author on the list…

An interesting peculiarity: my #7 author is someone I've never heard of. :-) The top six are roughly as expected: Geoffrey Chaucer leads by a factor of 2:1, followed by William Shakespeare (deceptive because I have five different editions of the Complete Works but almost never use four of them), Lewis Carroll (again a case where I have many, many different editions), J. R. R. Tolkien, Flavius Josephus (also a bit distorted because I have the ten-volume Loeb edition which is long because it has both Greek and English), and Homer (again, multiple different editions). But then comes Nina Baym, by whom I have no books. It appears that that is because she edited several editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, though not the ones I used in college. I suppose there is a combination issue in there somewhere, or I just entered the wrong edition.

Not sure the list is really right, but that's just because I have so many old books with no page count.

So cool!

No surprises, but I guess I'll have to add pagination for the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica because it should be on the list and isn't.

>13 waltzmn: I had decided that I didn't care about page count, too much bother. D'oh!

>14 tardis: Makes you wonder, who on LT has the highest page count. Or what's the average? Encyclopedia owners (and Pratchett and King readers, too) will have a distinct advantage :)

>15 DebiCates: Makes you wonder, who on LT has the highest page count. Or what's the average? Encyclopedia owners (and Pratchett and King readers, too) will have a distinct advantage :)

I agree that it's an interesting question, but figuring out page counts is not as simple as looking at prolific authors.

I'm an example. My leading author is Chaucer -- 17,000 pages of Chaucer. Which is far more than Chaucer ever wrote; if you put all the surviving works from his pen in standard paperback format, it would I'm sure be less than a thousand pages.

But I have The Riverside Chaucer and Robinson's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and a volume of Skeat's edition of Chaucer, and a dozen and a half volumes of the Variorum Chaucer and several volumes of the Manley/Rickert Chaucer and Root's edition of Troilus and Criseyde and other editions of The Parliament of Fowls and The Legend of Good Women and The Book of the Duchess, plus multiple editions and translations of The Canterbury Tales. No two of these books are the same, and most have their peculiar uses -- I could probably toss a couple of the Canterbury Tales editions without loss, but none of the others. So Chaucer wins because there are so many editions.

This can happen even with really short works. Sir Orfeo is a couple of dozen pages long, but I have Bliss's edition and a facsimile of the Auchinlek Manuscript text and at least five anthologies which contain it (e.g. by Donald Sands), plus there is the Tolkien translation. And so "books containing Sir Orfeo" (or words to that effect) ended up in my Top Twenty even though Sir Orfeo is relatively short. Yes, a prolific author will show up high on the list -- but so will an un-prolific pre-modern author who is popular enough to produce a lot of editions today.

A truly interesting statistic would be to see who has the most pages by Pratchett, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or the Orpheo-poet.

>16 waltzmn: That is impressive, and instructional. Somehow even I have two copies of The Canterbury Tales. One is digital for reading. The other is a hardback with some lovely woodblock illustrations by Rockwell Kent but I do not believe it is complete.

Your point is taken, though. (And what about those literal library or bookseller LT accounts, there are such things, right? If so, they are sure to put a red herring in the high numbers.)

I agree, it would be fun to see those that have the most of a given author, or title. Then dig into their reviews, sure to be enlightening for us mere mortals.

Hm. I thought it was working ok, until I saw it included an audiobook that is marked as such in the media field, but has a time length in the pages slot (with the drop down hours). I wonder what could be done about that barring deleting the information in the pages section.

My page doesn't generate. It tries for 10–15 seconds and then throws an error. Tried on two different OS's, on two different browsers.

Regenerating the data doesn't help, restricting the stats to a smaller collection than All books does help. (Why is most of the page in English? Genre names, tooltips, ...)

Nice :)

Evidently the trick to end up high on my list of authors is being an editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam.

I note some oddities - Museum Thessaloniki definitely doesn't have 1981 pages, frex. I'll have to check and correct when I get home. And how did Fundamentals of Queueing Theory end up in Genre: Sexuality and Gender Studies? (Gender doesn't belong there either, but it's more understandable why someone might think it would.)

It's slightly annoying that my #2 and #3 series by pages are the same under different names, but that's a problem with how the series are entered.

Something is funny with The Cambridge History of China, the graph says I've got three books of it but if I click through it shows all four volumes I've got.

Great statistics. Thanks for that.

Two things caught my attention, and I have a request for each.

When you hover over an entry, the total number of pages and the number of books are displayed.
I would also like to see the average number of pages per book and, if possible, the median.

The second thing I noticed is quite frustrating:
I've long followed the saying that life is too short to drink bad wine and read bad books.
So, I tend to leave books unfinished if I don't like them, or, very often, if I start them at the wrong time.

Now, the longest book on the list Peter Nadas, Parallelgeschichten is one of which I've only read 40 pages out of 1728.
Would it be possible to exclude books with specific tags (e.g., "not finished," "in progress," reference works, encyclopedias, etc.) from the statistics?
Of course, these tags should be able to vary from user to user.

For me, this would significantly improve the meaningfulness of the compilations.

>21 birder4106: I doubt it would be possible to exclude based on tags. If I were you, I'd create a new collection and call if "DNF" or something, and move those titles to that collection. Then they won't be counted unless you pick that category to look at.

>22 PawsforThought:
Thanks for the tip.

I already had a collection where I had recorded unfinished books (Books Unfinished).
I've since set all the options except "Active" to OFF.

And lo and behold: My second wish has already come true.
And I haven't given up hope for the first one yet.

Thanks

>1 AbigailAdams26: Maybe it's just me being curious, but since we put times into the pages tracking for audio books, how is the chart parsing those? Or will we potentially get a chart for Audio versus pages?

>24 gilroy: I am not entirely sure how the site is handling audiobook length. You're putting those numbers into the pages field, and then selecting hours and minutes, I assume. But whether the new chart includes those values or not, is a question for Lucy, as is that of whether a separate chart is possible for audiobooks. She's away now for the holidays, but I'll leave a note asking her.

>25 AbigailAdams26: Also as I said above, an audio book of mine is calculating with pages because (I assume) I filled in the length. Disappointing that the field is there, but is basically useless and confusing.

The chart includes audiobook time but only adds them as if they were page numbers.
E.g an audiobook that is listed as 5 hours and 10 minutes counts on the chart (and everywhere else) as 15 pages. An audiobook that is 10 hours and 5 minutes also counts on the chart as 15 pages.

>26 Bookmarque: One person’s useless and confusing is another person’s treasure. I’m delighted to have the hours and minutes fields for audiobooks, which I used to track separately in the publication field. I’m not sure how LT would convert time to “pages” for the purpose of this chart. If it’s important to you, you can record both hours, minutes, and pages, using the pagination of some other edition, or doctor that number by subtracting the hours and minutes so the total is the actual number of pages for that other edition. For me, while this chart is fun, I’d rather have the actual time length of my audiobooks on the work page.

>28 Charon07: By separating the values into 2 different fields. Audio length is its own category and it's unclear to me why it wasn't treated as such when the feature was introduced

>29 SandraArdnas: So then, for the purposes of this chart, audiobooks would simply be excluded? I presume the field would still then be “useless.” The only way that field can be useful for the purpose of this chart is to convert time to pages.

>29 SandraArdnas: Right - it's combining the two values into one which is the useless part. Maybe that's overstating it, but for me it's useless.

>30 Charon07: Time into pages? Ugh, please no. To me, if there are two different measuring types, we need two different measuring totals. Would folks who track pages want their talies to be measured in hours? Probably not.

>32 Bookmarque: well, we kind of do track our pages in hours of we record start and end dates for reading. Just gotta convert the days to hours.

(this is me being literal, lol. i agree that based on the number of features/displays that are using pages now, audiobook length needs to be handled differently)

>30 Charon07: I assume audiobooks would then get their own chart. I do not see a meaningful conversion of time to pages. You've read x pages and listened to x hours OTOH is meaningful.

I'm actually finding my own answer to my question. As I looked at the chart while viewing my "Read but not Owned" collection, I saw certain series were listed but shouldn't be. I listened to all of the Chloe Neill series, and it is listing them as 148 pages, instead of the hours upon hours of audio I listened to. :(

Can we get MDC shown as a tree, instead of as a list? So like 813 (all) -> 813 (only), 813.1 .. 813.9? Or just a table of top 3 digit sections? Telling me about 813.54 being bigger than 813 and 793.93 being bigger than 793 is saying more about the roughness of cataloging than the library itself.

>1 AbigailAdams26: Love this. The Top Authors in Pages offers the most accurate visualization of my reading tastes.

>24 gilroy: At the moment they will just be treated the same as pages, so 100 minutes => 100 pages; I can look at making separate charts for the minutes/hours vs. the pages ones.

>38 knerd.knitter: That would be helpful, otherwise having a time measurement is just too confusing and I just won't bother filling values. Sort of like having user added descriptions divorced from the description page.

>38 knerd.knitter: It would also be a big help if an hour counted as 60 minutes (or 60 pages), see: https://www.librarything.com/topic/372474

>19 anglemark: I was able to load your page with All Books selected. What error are you seeing?

>41 knerd.knitter: I saw that generic message about monkeys and trying to click this link instead, but now it works, so it seems to have been a transient problem.

>42 anglemark: Great!

My greatest disappointment is not really a flaw of the current functionality, but of how it works with (or fails to account for) compilations / anthologies. I own several and tend to read just one work from the volume, before setting it aside to return later for another work. For example, I subscribe to the Library of America, which model is to publish volumes compiling several books into one. So, 4-5 novels in one volume, and I tend to read just 1 novel and enter reading dates for it alone.

Currently, the pagination tracker counts all the pages of the volume, even when I've read just some of them. Similarly, when I return to read another work in the volume, I am credited with all pages, again.

It's not surprising it works this way. I merely make the observation.

>44 elenchus: I don't see how it could work any other way, with the data LT has. There might be value to a system for letting people track reading parts of anthologies, but it would be a fairly major overhaul.

And I'm not sure people would use it all that much. Consider, say, literature textbooks. They're often designed to include more stuff than the instructor will ever assign, so that the class can be tailored for some particular purpose (or even to let the students have a choice). In my college literature text, we read, I don't know, two dozen items out of twice that many. Am I really going to sit down and register that I read the short poem "Now Springs the Spray" but did not read "Fowls in the Frith"? I doubt it. :-)

>44 elenchus:, >45 waltzmn:

There’s a fairly simple way to do it, if you care to organize your library this way: catalogue the component novels as separate works, and put those rather than the anthology in Currently Reading.

>46 AndreasJ:

This might well work for >44 elenchus:, but it isn't really much use to my problem. I no more want to register the 48 different pieces in that literature anthology than I want to register which poems I read. :-)

To be sure, it doesn't matter in my case. If I remember reading something, then I don't need to track whether I read it. And if I don't remember reading it, then I might as well re-read it. :-)

Okay, so I've added a new page to Charts & Graphs under the Books section on the left that is "Time." It will show you the stats for the pages that are marked as hours or minutes. And the "Pages" one now excludes those. Be aware! This is only for the stats not for sorting or anything on the catalog because that is a totally different beast. Stats are sort of their own thing and easy to do a hack on to make the view better for users.

Yay!! Thanks Lucy. This makes MUCH more sense and even if I don't catch up all the entries for last year, I can make adding this info part of my routine with each title I add. Sweet.

>48 knerd.knitter: A new Talk post about this here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/377279