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I think locations are fine. I'm an engineer and have no problem with them. I really only use the percentage bar anyway.
I suspect that people's problems with them stem from the fact that the numbers are so darn big. People are used to p-books where a "long" book is 600-1000 pages. We have a frame of reference for that, and people know approximately how many pages per minute they read.
Now along come locations, and people have all of a sudden lost their frame of reference. If a location was 1280 bytes instead of 128, the numbers would be more sane and people wouldn't mind so much. This might be problematic for whispersync, however, since the granularity goes way down, and pulling up your book on an iPhone now doesn't get you as close to your previous sentence as before.
It's the same reason people (in the US) rebel against the metric system. For example, I know exactly how tall I am, 6 feet 2 inches. If someone were to come up to me and say "oh, he's about 198 centimeters tall" then in my head he seems like a giant at first... the number is big. Likewise, if someone says "2 meters tall", now the person is clearly a midget... the number is small. This feeling of confusion only lasts for a fraction of a second until you do the conversion in your head, but there's confusion nonetheless.
Don't even get me started of F to C conversions. In my world, 35 degrees is freezing cold, and no one will ever be able to convince me that Celcius (centigrade?) makes more sense for weather reports. Chemistry, maybe, but when the difference between a sweltering day and a freezing cold day is only a handful of degrees, the system is broken.
It's all about your frame of reference.
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