Toknormal i've put off asking this painful question for some time, but where do you see the total bids/asks? Did you mean that there are 2k asks and 17k bids on mintpal?
Hey, no pain !
I'm reading them off the Bitcoinwisdom charts which takes it's feed from the Mintpal API and actually gives a far more accurate and responsive picture of the orderbook than the exchange browser interface does....
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/mintpal/drkbtcIn the top right hand quadrant you'll see 4 columns of numbers. The first two are the exact representation of the order book closest to the price. The next two are the summary orders at larger intervals. e.g if it says this in the summary columns:
115 1439
114 1189
...then that means there's a total of 1439 DRK available at or below a price of 0.0115 BTC and 1189 DRK available at or below 0.0114 BTC. You need to read the columns as pairs - i.e. the first two are the price / quantity pair for each order level and columns 3 and 4 are the price / quantity pair for the summary levels.
The numbers below the price point are just exactly the same except for the bids. First two are orders, second two are summaries.
To get an idea of the market depth for a particular trade, you can use the "Estimate Trading" feature from the "Tools" menu. It will tell you how high a particular buy will push the price or how low a particular cashout will take it.
For example, right now the last trade price is 0.01047. But if you wanted to buy 3000 DRK then that "Trade Estimate" thingy will tell you that your average price for that trade will be 0.00116. That gives you an idea of the market liquidity close to the price point and therefore the size of the spread gap which will help you decide how easy it is to get back out or back in if you need to in a hurry.
For the total asks and total bids, I usually just read the top right and bottom right figures from the summary columns, although I'm never quite sure if it's showing absolutely everything or not. You also have cryptcoincharts...
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/pair/drk/btc/mintpal/10-days ...although it almost never agrees with Bitcoinwisdom so I usually ignore it. I've found BCW to be the absolute state of the art in precision and performance.
Hope that helps !
EDIT: That cryptocoincharts page that qwizzie just posted (the first one) is actually quite good. It's more up to date than the cryptocoincharts link I refer to above. I would generally trust his one or Bitcoinwisdom.
