@Vaesse - I haven't forgotten your request, but apart from having to spend the time updating other plugins I am waiting to see what if anything user_none is doing about changes to his APNX generation. The changes are mostly independent of each other but with all the other possible changes for this plugin I would rather make them all at once and be done with it for a while.
@Man Eating Duck - I wasn't aware of the word length readability comments you made, interesting. Personally I only have visible the word count column in my calibre UI from this plugin. Regardless of the debate over how page counts are computed (retrieved from a web page, calc'd from <p> tags or whatever), the simple fact is that you can more easily get a consistent result with word count.
The more "difficult" part for me and I suspect many others is training the brain to turn a whole new scale of numbers into something meaningful. As I have spent a lifetime reading paperbacks, I know roughly how many hours a book of a certain page size will take me to read. I have not bothered to figure out some "multiplier" to estimate a page count based on a word count (which could only be a range due to the well covered issues of page size, print size etc).
I'm more comfortable with it now than at first glance, but I still wouldn't say that in casual conversation if asked how long a book was that I would expect anything other than a blank stare if I said "120,000 words" instead of "500 pages" or whatever.