Stories displayed in a single page ?

[canonrfshooter]

What is really annoying is that some stories are spread over multiple pages. It is possible to make the pages larger, e.g. a three page story fits into a single page ?

 

[TheWritingGroup]

What is really annoying is that some stories are spread over multiple pages. It is possible to make the pages larger, e.g. a three page story fits into a single page ?

The site earns revenue with ads. They want to display more ads. Thus, they need to display more pages.

In principle, they could modify the software to have a paid ad-free membership level. In practice, they don't have the tech staff available to develop it, and apparently they don't have the capital to pay for someone else's software. Don't expect the page-chopping to go away.

-Rocco

 

[AG31]

The site earns revenue with ads. They want to display more ads. Thus, they need to display more pages.

In principle, they could modify the software to have a paid ad-free membership level. In practice, they don't have the tech staff available to develop it, and apparently they don't have the capital to pay for someone else's software. Don't expect the page-chopping to go away.

-Rocco

I see the same ads on every page of the story.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

I see the same ads on every page of the story.

Yes, and they are located at the very top and bottom of the story pages. So, if Lit were to display stories as one page, you'd see the ads twice (at most): Once when opening the story, and you're looking forward to reading the story, and once when reaching the end, IF you reach the end, and maybe just want to comment.

Now, you see the ads twice per story page. So, a story with five pages will put those ads into view ten times, garnering a much higher chance of catching you in a receptive mood where they MAY draw your attention more than continuing to read the story.

 

[live4thebj]

So I take it there is no simple way?

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

So I take it there is no simple way?

Well, you could install a browser plugin like Greasemonkey and write a "simple" script that gets the URL's from the pagination links, preloads the following pages' contents, and then adds them to the end of the first page successively... but whether that's "simple" or not depends on you.
AFAIK, that's the only option there is, though.

 

[canonrfshooter]

Yes, and they are located at the very top and bottom of the story pages. So, if Lit were to display stories as one page, you'd see the ads twice (at most): Once when opening the story, and you're looking forward to reading the story, and once when reaching the end, IF you reach the end, and maybe just want to comment.

Now, you see the ads twice per story page. So, a story with five pages will put those ads into view ten times, garnering a much higher chance of catching you in a receptive mood where they MAY draw your attention more than continuing to read the story.

So why not putting every so many lines / words on a page an ad ?
The single page mode reads easier.

 

[ElectricBlue]

So why not putting every so many lines / words on a page an ad ?
The single page mode reads easier.

The site has to optimise its content display for multiple different device types, so what's best for you isn't necessarily best for the next reader. Also, the story content is a giant database running on twenty-five year old software, so I'm guessing there are technical limitations in terms of page sizes. I can't see the page display size changing.

 

[designatedvictim]

The site has to optimise its content display for multiple different device types, so what's best for you isn't necessarily best for the next reader. Also, the story content is a giant database running on twenty-five year old software, so I'm guessing there are technical limitations in terms of page sizes. I can't see the page display size changing.

It's also possible that the stories may be saved as fixed pages in the database. Depends upon the site design.

Given what I've seen on my own submissions, the pages always seem to break at what appear to be deliberately chosen points, which seems fixed per-entry, not simply querying out a static number of lines on the pages-loads.

I, at least, have always thought this was deliberate. It tends to leave each page on a mini-cliffhanger, if the material lends itself to it, and it feels like it's determined at publishing-time on approval. This effect would prompt readers to click to the next page.

By tailoring the page length when being saved to the database, the page-viewer doesn't have to do any heavy-lifting when rendering to the browser.

I suppose it's also possible they are saved to the database as a single record with page-break markers at the appropriate places, then the page-viewer may just skip forward, counting markers until it reaches the one it wants to start with, and stop at the next one. This would mean the page-renderer would have to work harder on each page-load.

Given that a site like this lives or dies on page views, I suspect that the least-overhead method would be to break the post into pages once at publishing and then not require the renderer to do any thinking on display, just dump the whole thing and not worry about what's in it. This would also mean it doesn't have to retrieve it all, making the load faster and less data-heavy, then figure out what to display on every page-load, although the bulk-retrieval could be cached.

It would be a snap to just re-write the page-viewer to retrieve all of the sections at once, but that could leave you with monster one-page views.

I have one submission that's 9 Lit-pages long. That is already an awful lot to throw at the reader in slices.

But, mainly, TWG is most likely right. Increasing ad impressions through multiple pages is probably the primary driver.

EB also has a valid point in the realm of device display diversity.

3K-to-3.5K-per page seems to be the sweet spot they long-ago settled upon.

I suppose OP was probably thinking along the lines of format-length on a per-member basis, but I know I'm not a fan of seeing Walls of Text. Even my nine-page ramble discourages many readers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

It's also possible that the stories may be saved as fixed pages in the database. Depends upon the site design.

Given what I've seen on my own submissions, the pages always seem to break at what appear to be deliberately chosen points, which seems fixed per-entry, not simply querying out a static number of lines on the pages-loads.

3750 words, plus or minus, is my metric for a page length.

I, at least, have always thought this was deliberate. It tends to leave each page on a mini-cliffhanger, if the material lends itself to it, and it feels like it's determined at publishing-time on approval. This effect would prompt readers to click to the next page.

The only deliberate thing is breaking at the end of a paragraph. This is a machine decision, not a human choice, as evidenced by the number of single sentence last pages there are. I've got two or three, they're a pain. I tried to fix one by chopping a hundred words, which should have pulled the last sentence forward to the previous page, but it didn't. Which supports my suspicion that once you've got a page on the data set, you've got it forever.

I have one submission that's 9 Lit-pages long. That is already an awful lot to throw at the reader in slices.

The longest single submission I've seen was 80+ pages, about 300,000 words.

 

[designatedvictim]

3750 words, plus or minus, is my metric for a page length.

That's at the high-end of my own rough guestimate.

The only deliberate thing is breaking at the end of a paragraph. This is a machine decision, not a human choice, as evidenced by the number of single sentence last pages there are. I've got two or three, they're a pain. I tried to fix one by chopping a hundred words, which should have pulled the last sentence forward to the previous page, but it didn't. Which supports my suspicion that once you've got a page on the data set, you've got it forever.

I hadn't considered those one- or two-sentence pages. Maybe I just haven't seen many. I have seen one ore two, but not enough to impress the idea on me.

That would argue against a manual break entry. Although it could be machine-selection with, perhaps, manual adjusting when wanted.

I suppose I got the impression of deliberation due to how my own works split.

I guess much of my material is naturally formatting into Lit-sized pieces.

It was certainly nothing I ever did consciously.

Either way, automatic or approver selection, would seem to tip the scales toward the 'stored-as-pages' suggestion I made. Regardless, I'd have expected the pages to have re-flowed upon approval when you resubmitted them, though.

The longest single submission I've seen was 80+ pages, about 300,000 words.

That's a lot of words!

I don't feels so bad that mine has just topped out at 128K with more fleshing-out to go.