Some, but not all, Baen ebooks already include explicit paragraph numbers. For example, the start and end of
The Mountains of Mourning:
Quote:
<a id="p0" name="p0"></a><p onmouseover="PNo(0)">Miles heard the woman weeping ...
<a id="p706" name="p706"></a><p onmouseover="PNo(706)">He knew who he served now.
|
So far as I can tell, these are not used.
I agree with kovidgoyal that paragraph numbers are best for referencing, and should always be available (particularly as they are easy to generate).
The only argument for page numbers is that they are about the right size for humans to deal with, and here I am talking about physical book pages. I know that some people strongly object to device independent "page" sizes for ebooks, but I like FBReader's approach of defining a page as a fixed number of characters. One way to think of this is as another way of representing the fraction of the book read, but in people friendly units. The Kindle has a similar scheme, but its quantum is way too small - leading to huge "page" counts.