Page numbers in an ebook, and why there are none
You have the print proof in your hands, and the ebook open on a phone beside it. Page 143 of the paperback is somewhere in the middle of chapter nine. On the phone there is no page 143, and no way to get to one.
This is not a setting you missed. A reflowable ebook has no pages to number.
The page is made at the moment of reading
A print PDF fixes every line in place before it leaves your computer. The page is a physical object, so it is decided once and it stays decided.
An EPUB is the opposite. It carries text and structure, and the page is assembled on the reader's device out of things you do not control: screen size, the face they read in, their type size, line spacing and margins. A reader who bumps the type up one step has just made your book longer. Not apparently longer — longer, by the only measure the device has.
So the device cannot show page 143, because there is no such page. It can only say roughly where you are in a stream of text, and every reading system invents its own way of saying that.
What a device shows instead
Three systems, broadly, and one app may offer more than one.
- A percentage. The closest thing to a portable position, because it is derived from the file itself. Its weakness is that it counts everything: a long back matter section means your story ends well before the reader's 100%, which is why a novel can feel like it stopped early.
- A position or location counter. A count of the underlying text rather than of pages, which is why it keeps changing when you change the type size less than a page number would. It is specific to the system that generates it, so two readers on different apps quoting the same number are not pointing at the same sentence.
- Time left in the chapter. An estimate built from that reader's own measured reading speed. It is personal by design and it moves while they read.
None of these match your print edition, and none of them reliably match another reader's device. Treat them as a progress bar, not as an address.
Three things this actually breaks
An index built on page numbers. A column of numbers that point at nothing is worse than no index, because it looks like a working tool. If the book needs one in the ebook, the entries have to become links to the places they refer to. If that is more work than it is worth, drop it and let the reader search. Does your nonfiction book need an index? covers the judgment call.
A cross-reference that says "see page 143." It is simply wrong in the ebook, and a reader has no way to act on it. Rewrite it as something that exists in both editions — "see chapter nine," "see the section on paper weight" — or make it a link, which is better than either. Links in an ebook, and where they should point covers how to build them so they do not rot.
Citing the ebook in academic or reference work. This one is genuinely awkward and not your fault. A location number cannot be checked by anyone reading on a different system, so the convention has settled on citing the chapter and section instead, which is stable across every edition of the book including the printed one. If you expect to be cited, give your sections real headings and number your chapters, because that is the coordinate system your readers will be forced to use.
In the Interior Formatter. It generates the contents from your real chapter structure rather than from a page you typed, numbers the chapters, and builds the EPUB 3 and the print PDF from the same manuscript — so the navigation your ebook readers use does not depend on the pagination only the print edition has. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Mapping back to the print edition
There is a mechanism in the EPUB specification for carrying a map of the print edition's page boundaries inside the ebook, so that a reader can be shown the page number their paperback would have had. Libraries and schools care about it, because a class reading the same book in three formats needs one set of numbers to argue over.
Support varies: by store, by reading system, by whether a print edition exists at all, and by whether the mapping was built in the first place. Do not assume it, and do not promise it in your description. If your book is going to libraries or classrooms, ask the store or the distributor you publish through what they currently accept and display, and get the answer for your account rather than from a blog post.
Write so pagination does not matter
The fix is upstream of the file. Three habits remove the whole problem.
- Refer to structure, not to position. Chapters, sections and named headings exist in every edition. Pages exist in one.
- Let the contents do the navigating. In print, a contents page is a list with numbers beside it. In an ebook it is the navigation, and the device builds its own menu from the same structure. See Does your book need a table of contents?.
- Check the links on a real device before you upload. Tap every contents entry and confirm it lands on that chapter and not the one after it, and tap every internal cross-reference you wrote. Checking an ebook before you publish it has the full pass.
Your print edition still gets running heads and folios, set properly, because there the page is real. See Running heads and page numbers. The ebook gets structure instead, and structure is the thing that survives.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: How your ebook actually looks on other people's devices · More: Turning a finished print book into an ebook · Links in an ebook, and where they should point · EPUB and print PDF are two different books