MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How big is that e-book anyway?

msundman · 09-01-2009, 04:06 PM

First of all page numbers are completely moronic. Pages are different sizes and with different margins and different font sizes and different spacings etc, so they are extremely misleading both in p and e. The only reason for having "page" numbers in e is because people are used to them, no matter how misleading they are.

So what alternatives do we have? We have (at least) paragraph counts, word counts and character counts, with SI prefixes (e.g., "3 kchars" = "3000 chars"). I very strongly prefer character count, because it properly reflects the real size, and works well with different languages (and with different use patterns within the same language). E.g., what might be said with 15 words in Swedish or English might be said in 7 words in Finnish, but the latter are longer. (E.g., "med min bil" in Swedish ("with my car" in English) is "autollani" in Finnish.)

09-01-2009, 04:06 PM	#65
msundman Zealot Posts: 103 Karma: 269 Join Date: Aug 2006 Device: FBReader on Android	First of all page numbers are completely moronic. Pages are different sizes and with different margins and different font sizes and different spacings etc, so they are extremely misleading both in p and e. The only reason for having "page" numbers in e is because people are used to them, no matter how misleading they are. So what alternatives do we have? We have (at least) paragraph counts, word counts and character counts, with SI prefixes (e.g., "3 kchars" = "3000 chars"). I very strongly prefer character count, because it properly reflects the real size, and works well with different languages (and with different use patterns within the same language). E.g., what might be said with 15 words in Swedish or English might be said in 7 words in Finnish, but the latter are longer. (E.g., "med min bil" in Swedish ("with my car" in English) is "autollani" in Finnish.)