Not to give undue weight to something I saw one person complain about one time

[dira]

...But, look, I will take any opportunity not to write, so: a question about reading very long fic on the AO3 (say, 75-100,000 words, as a totally random hypothetical).

Do you care if there are chapters? Is that a thing? I personally kind of enjoy having escaped the tyranny of having to break a story into parts for posting because it makes my life easier--and I tend not to pay much attention to chapter divisions when reading--but apparently a non-zero number of people really prefer having chapters, so now I am curious.

Comments

[montanaharper]

It doesn't matter to me much either way. I don't read things that long on the computer; they all get downloaded as epubs to my iPad and read in Stanza anyway, so I don't even have to click on the "next chapter" link. (Though I have occasionally been flummoxed by shorter things with chapters...when I get to the bottom and the story seems kind of incomplete, and it takes me a minute to realize that there's more, if only I clicky the button.)

Though that leads me to my personal pet peeve, as someone who downloads long stuff to the iPad: stories posted as a series when they probably ought to be chapters in a WiP because they're not narratively complete on their own. Partly that bugs me because I like to know something is a WiP before I make the decision to start reading it (or not), and partly because downloading stories in a series (and compiling them into a single epub for reading convenience) is more labor-intensive than downloading a chaptered work. </entitlement>

[amalthia]

There is a plugin for Calibre called Epubmerge that will merge stories into a single file. I use it for series all the time.

[montanaharper]

Yep, that's what I use. :-) I'm kind of picky, though, and I don't like what it does with the cover page (makes an image of the first page of the first document; if it's text it's pixellated and if it's a graphic, the aspect ratio is messed up), so I have to go in and use Sigil to edit that out.

I also use a download bookmarklet to make downloading stories in a series faster, and a greasemonkey script to put download buttons on works pages. I'd link to them, but I honestly don't remember where I got either one.

[amalthia]

Which downloading bookmarklet do you use??? I'm also curious about the greasemonkey script.

[montanaharper]

I've renamed the bookmarklet, so I don't even know what it was originally called. AO3 Downloader, maybe? *pokes around the internet* Okay, pretty sure this is it.

And the greasemonkey script I think I also got from ao3some. *looks* Aha! You can find it here.

[amalthia]

Thanks!