I pretty much agree with Jellby on this one. I've always thought of "pages" in a book as a more nebulous thing that has great deal of variety between books (go figure). But once I start reading a given book and get a feel for what constitutes a "page" there (usually only takes a few page turns to get acclimated), I can then make reasonable estimations of how long the book is, how long the chapter is, how much more progress I can before I doze off, etc. Not surprisingly, this still holds true with electronics texts. If an ebook that I'm reading has large margins or slightly larger (or smaller) text than what I'm used to, it still only takes me a few screenfuls to fall into the rhythm of what a "page" is for that particular book. And again, the same holds true for the ADE page numbers.
As far as being able to cite a particular section from a book, a different mechanism entirely is needed, and this has already been dealt with to a certain degree in the print world. Methods that are commonly used there are line numbers (for things like poetry), or paragraph numbers (for other verse works).
What I don't quite get are the people who want to measure books in character counts. "Great, only 1726 characters until the end of the chapter!"
|