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How to fairly compare books with very different numbers of pages in a competitive challenge?

Like in War and Peace (1400) as opposed to The Magic Finger (65).

Open for replies from January 14 to 20.

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This has been extensively debated before. No consensual conclusion, because it is really a difficult point.

Ideas go from “one book, one point�, regardless of the number of pages, to “books over 1000 pages count as two books�, so two points scored.

The first was used in the Hogwarts House Cup Challenge of 2018.

Any criteria is subject to debate.

Like, what happens with “one book, one point�? Once people realize reading long books isn’t competitive, everyone focuses on short books.

Or “no, that should be 800 pages, instead of 1000�. There is no completely good solution possible here. The line could be drawn at 500, 400 or any other number. There would always be the problem of a 399 page book counting as one and a 401 page book counting as two.

OK, we could create several categories: up to 100 pages, one point, 200 pages, 2 points, etc. But the tracking of this would be a heavy duty thing � without being a good solution.

There are other pending issues, like using average page counts or not, including enlisted competitors who don’t read, etc.

The best solution I have seen so far is the one adopted in the Winter Olympic Games Challenge of January / February 2018.

Adapting that solution to any challenge, it would be like this:


EHRTBM Challenge Categories

Participants will be competing both as INDIVIDUALS and as a TEAM.


C1: Books Read by Team
- Total count of all books read by all participants of a team
- Team

C2: Books Read by Participant
- Total count of all books read by a single participant
- Individual

C3: Books per Participant by Team
- Total count of all books read by all participants of a team, divided by number of participants competing for that team
- Team

C4: Pages Read by Team
- Total count of all pages of all books read by all participants of a team
- Team

C5: Pages Read by Participant
- Total count of all pages for all books read by a single participant
- Individual

C6: Pages per Participant by Team
- Total count of all pages of all books read by all participants of a team, divided by number of participants competing for that team
- Team

C7: Book Club Reads by Team
- Total count of all EHRTBM book club books read by all participants of a team (note: can be ANY book from the group's bookshelf)
- Team

C8: Book Club Books Read by Participant
- Total count of all EHRTBM book club books read by a single participant (note: can be ANY book from the group's bookshelf)
- Individual

C9: Book Club Books per Participant by Team
- Total count of all EHRTBM book club books read by all participants of a team, divided by number of participants competing for that team (note: can be ANY book from the group's bookshelf)
- Team

C10: Longest Book Read
- By page count, longest book read by a single participant during the challenge
- Individual


Why is this solution so good?

� You read short books? OK, you’ll do good in C2. And so will your team in C1.

� Read long books? Great for C5. And great for your team in C4.

� C3 and C6 are the categories where the average book or page reading counts. So, if you have one great and fast reader / player, but a lot of slow readers, that will reflect in the score. A team of not so great, but regular readers may win here.

� C7, C8 and C9 are the categories to reward the most reads in the BOTM of the group, one thing that has been claimed to be valued.

� C10 needs no explanation.

Of course, there are ten simultaneous competitions. Which brings back some difficulty for tracking. But I think benefit / cost is very favourable. We can solve the difficulty by sharing the workload as we have been doing in other activities � like checking in the Relay Race Challenge.

This doesn’t solve all that has been discussed before, but the great majority of the issues.

So, that’s part of what I am proposing for the 2019 challenges.

And I’d like to hear from you, as we have been doing.

Please, contributions from Jan 14 to Jan 20!


An also, please contribute in our other discussion about challenges:

What books should count in a challenge?

Reserved

Reserved

I really like this changes for the challenges since at the last Hogwarts House Cup Challenge I ended up reading shorter books to not hinder my team.

So far, sounds good although the amount of work to keep track is bigger.

Thanks Marcos!

Great idea, I tend to mix long books that I want to read with shorter books to keep up with the "as many as possible", so it's great to know that when the time comes for Les Misérables The Stand Under the Dome or Moby-Dick, or, the Whale I'm still competitive enough to not hinder my team (or myself)

I'm new to this group and challenges. What are the teams? Must we participate in one, and if so, how? Thank you!

I agree, I think the Page Count criteria from the Jan-Feb 2018 Olympics Challenge is as straightforward as it's going to get & worked well. Let's keep using it.

Laurie wrote: "I'm new to this group and challenges. What are the teams? Must we participate in one, and if so, how? Thank you!"

Hi, Laurie!

This the continuation of a previous long discussion. Yes, it may be a little hard to understand for new members. :-) Don't worry, just follow it until you get the whole picture.

These teams are general teams, in challenges that are organized in teams. You don't have to do anything in our group if you don't want to! It is totally optional.

To know about the challenges for 2019, go to "Discussions" folder (top right hand side of the pages in the desktop browser version). There you have the "Challenge Corner" folder with the challenges. Click on each one, there are descriptions and explanations at the beginning. If you decide to join a challenge, just follow the instructions.

And if you still have any doubts, just ask, we're here for you! :-)

This seems complicated, and I have to be honest the reason I don't participate in the relay race is because I don't want to count page numbers.

Most groups that have challenges just establish a minimum page requirement for the book to count towards that challenge, often 100 or 150 pages or 1hr or 1.5 hours on audio.

Letting books that are over 1000 pages long count as two books seems legit, but letting a 10 page children's book or short story be equal to a novel or novella seems unfair for group challenges.

The averaging feature should stay or the groups need to be roughly equal in size (+ - 5 participants?)

I've just started a companion discussion to the topic of 2019 challenges. Please contribute there as well!

See it here:

What books should count in a challenge?

I'm just ready to start tracking books! Let's read!

Thank you Marcos for the huge efforts in the discussions :D

I agree with Melanie, I think it is a bit complicated too.
It is not a show stopper for me, but it requires too much tracking and counting and effort.

To me, this works potentially well with the olympics theme, just because in olympics we have 100s of games and countries and challanges. However, I don't see it working as a general read-like-mad challanges style.

And we have established from Relay Race challange, mistakes happen in page counts! and in a fast paced compatitve challange, tracking these might be difficult.

I would say like Melanie, have a minimum of 100 Pages (-5 pages is accepted). For Audiobook minimum of 1 hour (-5 min is accepted). And then for all books we consider the edition that comes first in goodreads to be fair (most common edition). Because really the larger number of pages don't always mean a larger book. It is just the same book at the end.
Of course we use the language we read the book in when searching for the first book result, because sized differes with language variations.

Also, to have some kind of fairness within books length, I would recommend every 500 pages count as a point. This doesn't require a nitty gritty page count, it is simple to calculate (by points not by pages) and it alows some level of fairness.

Now why did I choose the numbers 100 page and 500 pages? Just because we have to choose a number and they seem "nice" cutting lines.
Can we debate them? Yes of course we can debate any number. Should we really put an effort of selecting "the right number", I don't believe so! Anything can work, it is just a matter of drawing line somewhere.

Hi, just reading through some of these, and I agree on simplifying. It needs to be clear, concise and not a discouragement for participation. Some challenges make sense to get more complicated, but Iike Melanie, I typically don’t participate in challenges that require page counting. I just don’t get much enjoyment out of it and can find it stressful.

I like that we have complex challenges and simpler ones are good too. I don’t think we should be trying to have all challenges be for all members, but have a variety for those that suit.

The Hogwarts challenge really got overrun by these types of discussions, so I do want some general rules. I like tiers the best, but am not too much in favor of a minimum page number as a general rule, partly because we don’t feature it in the BOTM nominations. Page numbers and audio lengths are not a perfect measurement either. For example, classics often times have forwards and afterwards that add length. Or different versions have different page sizes and squeeze more words on a page. The version of Gone With the Wind I read was 880 pages, and we’re listing it as 1037 in nominations right now. Audio depends on the reader. Anna Karenina, for example varied from 30 to 40 hours when I thought about listening to it during the group read.

I would suggest every 200 pages count as a book. While it’s all arbitrary, it also feels like a natural cutoff. I don’t find too many books sitting at that length.

As someone who is actually currently reading War and Peace and who loves big books I do feel like I'm letting my team down by not completing as many books.

However, I do appreciate that counting page numbers could be tedious especially for mods. I think a tiered approach makes sense with either 300 or 400 being the cutoff point. I like this range because most of my reading fell into this range and it is probably around the average length for a book.

Another challenge I am in counts pages by the original hardback edition in the language you read in. I think this is fair because I don't know whether the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ default is the same for all readers.

Thanks, all. Some replies - starting with the easier ones! :-)

Satrina and Mariana agree with the proposition.

Satrina wrote: "So far, sounds good although the amount of work to keep track is bigger."

Like I said in the introduction at the top of this page, I think benefit / cost is very favourable. We can solve the difficulty by sharing the workload as we have been doing in other activities.

And other suggested solutions wouldn't be much easier, like number of page ranges.

Mariana wrote: "Great idea, .... so it's great to know that when the time comes for .... Moby-Dick .... , I'm still competitive enough to not hinder my team (or myself)"

That was one of the most complained about issue in the Hogwarts Cahallenge. And this is the very aim of the proposition.

Susan wrote: "I agree, I think the Page Count criteria from the Jan-Feb 2018 Olympics Challenge is as straightforward as it's going to get & worked well. Let's keep using it."

Thanks, Susan.

Jess wrote: "However, I do appreciate that counting page numbers could be tedious especially for mods."

Hi, Jess!

I'm not that much afraid of that, because:

- Kasey did it for the Winter Olympics Challenge, and she did it on her own, without any help, like the Prefects.

- Celeste did page counting for the Hogwarts House Challenge, since as a Prefect for Ravenclaw, she just decided to do so. And she did it alone as well.

- A management like this, of course, is better done with the use of a spreadsheet. That's what Kasey did, by the way. Like this, there will be no math mistakes, for instance.

So, I am very confident that using a spreadsheet and sharing the work with some other collaborators (very much like the Prefects), we can do that! :-)

Melanie wrote: "Letting books that are over 1000 pages long count as two books seems legit, but letting a 10 page children's book or short story be equal to a novel or novella seems unfair for group challenges."

Hi, Melanie!

Yes, that's not fair at all. That's we're trying to solve.

"Most groups that have challenges just establish a minimum page requirement for the book to count towards that challenge, often 100 or 150 pages or 1hr or 1.5 hours on audio.

I don't like this because no border will be fair enough.

Also, just on this page, we have different ideas of what is the fair / good / ideal limits.

Zainab: I would recommend every 500 pages count as a point.

Joanna: I would suggest every 200 pages count as a book.

Jess: I think a tiered approach makes sense with either 300 or 400 being the cutoff point.

And that's only from a few comments. As more people come into the chat, we might have more ideas. Furthermore, that's based on individual feelings or perceptions. Please see more of my comments on this topic in this thread - I'll post later.

As I said in the introduction, "There is no completely good solution possible here. The line could be drawn at 500, 400 or any other number. There would always be the problem of a 399 page book counting as one and a 401 page book counting as two."

Even if we choose one or more limits / tiers, giving one point to a 399 page book and 2 points to a 400 page one is quite unfair, since the reading effort was the same (statistically speaking).

I like the idea of tiers. On another thread, someone suggested 1-250, 251-500, 501-750, 751 and over. To quibble over one or two pages seems petty if you know ahead of time what the rules are. You can choose to read or not read a book accordingly.

Hi, Beth!

Agreed as to the "one page" issue. That was just an example, the same could be said for 10 pages or any other boundary.

Tiers are better than only one limit, as has been suggested. I considered that in the introduction too. :-) But still I don't see that as the best solution.

And more reasoning for not having a minimum of 100 pages.

I just listed some great books under 100 pages I read in 2018 for the challenges:

Poemas à noite by Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke, 86 pages

Trakl is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists. Rilke is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets.

Vestido de Noiva, 88 pages

A play by one of the great Brazilian playwrights of the twentieth century.

Auto da Barca do Inferno, 72 pages

A play by Gil Vicente, the first Portuguese playwright, written in 1571.

O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida, 64 pages

A short story by José Saramago, Portuguese author and Nobel Prize winner.

And other short books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beckett, etc.

This is all excellent literature, doesn't sound good to exclude any of them. So, in the proposed method, they'd count good for books, but not so much for pages. Every body is happy.

Zainab wrote: "And we have established from Relay Race challange, mistakes happen in page counts! and in a fast paced compatitve challange, tracking these might be difficult."

Zainab, in the Relay Race, that's everyone having to sum! So, yes, mistakes happen.

As proposed here, everyone just informs the number of pages of a book. One person, only, will insert that number in a speadsheet. Automated addition. Much less mistakes, guaranteed. Just the same ones as would happen in any other methods, like inserting a wrong number. :-)

Zainab wrote: "And then for all books we consider the edition that comes first in goodreads to be fair (most common edition). Because really the larger number of pages don't always mean a larger book. It is just the same book at the end.
Of course we use the language we read the book in when searching for the first book result, because sized differes with language variations."

Now, this is a very good point!

Editions differ a lot. Once were were talking about reading longer books like "War and Peace". Someone had a 1400 page edition, while mine (TBR...) is a 2500 page one!!

Why is that? Because of different book sizes - the smaller the page, the lesser text per page, more pages per edition. Also because of the font size. Smaller letters, more text per page, less pages per edition.

So, the current rule of using the number of pages in the edition read could also be unfair to some extent, like in the case of War and Peace above. So, if everyone used the same Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ editon for one given book, that'd be very equalizing!

But then I think it would be better to use not our own language, for the same reason of variation. Everyone would use use the very same edition. To be developed. :-)

I made my comments in the other thread but will echo a couple of things: comparing a 24 page book to a 240 page book is not equitable. I agree with Beth - give a simple point system to the length of the book and be done with it. It is better than what happens now.
I do want to add that I appreciate having the chance to voice my opinion. I think our moderators are doing a great job of being inclusive and inviting in terms of these discussions.

Laura wrote: "I do want to add that I appreciate having the chance to voice my opinion. I think our moderators are doing a great job of being inclusive and inviting in terms of these discussions. "

Thanks, Laura!

I do believe that's not only the best way but also very productive. We get a lot of ideas, can perfect a project and, in average, more people will see their preferences taken into account.

Hi, Joanna!

I mostly agree with Joanna! :-) And I mean, not just on this subject!

So, to some of her points. More later, Joanna!

Joanna Loves Reading wrote: "The Hogwarts challenge really got overrun by these types of discussions, so I do want some general rules.

Yes, that's it, I guess we all, or most of us do!

I .... am not too much in favor of a minimum page number as a general rule, partly because we don’t feature it in the BOTM nominations.

Agreed, as in my comment 21 and others.

Page numbers and audio lengths are not a perfect measurement either. For example, classics often times have forwards and afterwards that add length. Or different versions have different page sizes and squeeze more words on a page. The version of Gone With the Wind I read was 880 pages, and we’re listing it as 1037 in nominations right now. Audio depends on the reader. Anna Karenina, for example varied from 30 to 40 hours when I thought about listening to it during the group read."

Precisely my view, as presented in my comment 23. I think Zainab has prompted a fair solution. Just thinking about that (also mentioned in the same comment 23).

I really missed the page number count in the Hogwarts challenge. It pushed me to read the shortest books I could find and although it did broaden my horizon, it would be nice to be able to read longer books without letting your team down. Either a per-page count or a tiered count would have my preference. I think this could stand on its own, or combined with the overall total number of books read. Looking forward to the Hogwarts challenge at the end of the year! I'm sure it will be fun no matter what solution you guys choose :)

The Winter Olympics Challenge was too complex in my opinion. I looked at it and decided not participate due to the complexity. I am glad that people enjoyed it, but it just highlights why challenges of different scopes are good.

I get that page counting was done by some mods and prefects, but that doesn’t mean everyone has the time for that. I certainly didn’t and don’t. Also, the Olympics challenge was the last one Kasey did, so she may have kept up with it, but none of us can say that it was or wasn’t too much too keep track of.

On the Hogwarts and any competitive challenge, I do think books need to be logged in Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ tracking to count. This is a reversal from what I said was ok for Hogwarts this year. It created unnecessary controversy unfortunately.

I would support a minimum page of 50 pages, if we do minimum. And for audio, there should be a page count that can be used rather than going off of time.

I like your proposal for some challenges but not all. I think we need a tiered version defined too for simpler challenges.

As long as we have it defined and decided upon, it will be fair.

So, I guess I like the idea of having a “category version� and a “tiered version�. And for competitive challenges, we can just say which version we’ll be using for that challenge.

Ok, I started this post in one place and didn’t end where I thought, so I hope it makes sense.