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With the ebooks I generate myself (using pandoc), I have a single page count for the entire book.

Ebooks that I purchase off the Kobo store have a separate page count for individual chapters, which is handy for books (should I carry on reading or just go to sleep?) and even more attractive for short story collections. It's an effect I'd like to replicate in my own ebooks.

I understand that Kobo uses its own custom 'kepub' format, an extension of epub 2. Is what I want possible with vanilla epub? Preferably in such a way as will work on a range of devices, and that will 'stick' when run through kindlegen.

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  • How does knowing that you are on page X of a chapter help you in determining if you should continue reading? Does it also show a total of pages for the chapter (X of Y)? Or does that pagecount count down?
    – Anthon
    Feb 3, 2014 at 3:15
  • @Anthon It shows 'page 4 of 20' (or whatever), so it gives an idea of how long there is to go in the current chapter.
    – evilsoup
    Feb 3, 2014 at 11:31

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Kobo ereaders have two different reading engines, one for .epub files, another for .kepub.epub files.
These two engines have some little differences, one is the way page count is displayed: for the entire book with .epub, for a single chapter with .kepub.epub.
If you want to use this feature the simplest way is to rename the file extension, but it is advisable to use Calibre instead. If you install the Advanced Kobo Driver plugin it will automatically convert .epub files in .kepub.epub when you send them to the device, while performing some optimizations that you won't have if you simply change the extension.
And, this is a feature of the reading device, not of the file itself: it's not coded in your ebook, it's the ereader that has it and use it when detects the file type: you won't get it in other devices even if you change the extension.

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  • Thanks. I was hoping for there to be a standard way of doing this, but a straight 'no' is the next-best thing. Ah, well.
    – evilsoup
    Feb 3, 2014 at 11:33
  • Ah, finally I got per chapter page count working for my Kobo Forma and my Epubs, thank you!
    – cseelus
    Mar 19, 2019 at 21:36

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