Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Thanks - sounds as if my guess was right; it's the fact that my books are using <div> tags to mark paragraphs, rather than <p>, which is the cause of the trouble. I would guess that when you do a Mobi to Mobi conversion in Calibre, Calibre is replacing the <div> with <p>, so it then works.
|
This comment turned out rather lengthy - TL;DR: Use word count! Page count for *any* book (paper as well as digital) will be completely arbitrary. Consider yourselves warned
I just wanted to throw in a general comment about metrics here. The reason I quoted you, HarryT, is that I recently re-read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories from your epub. I'd like to thank you for making the effort; you did a very good job
. Also, thanks to kiwidude for the
word count that he made for all of us, it is indispensable to me.
Now on to my comment: Page count is a bad metric for "book length", not just with digital books. There are obvious issues for digital publications like the one HarryT mentions which makes it pretty much a no-go for digital books, but the problem is also evident in paper prints. As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, page count depends on layout, font size, and format (as in paper size). I work at a publishing house, and it turns out that seasoned authors tend to focus on word count, while freelance copy-editors bill not by printed pages, but by "pages" defined as 2400 characters per page (IIRC). Some also bill per hour, which doesn't concern my point at all. My point is that all of these are in a business which is very well acquainted with the concept of pages, and they know that it doesn't work as a metric.
My advice to anyone who wants to just get a feel for how long a digital book in their library is: use word count. Divide by 1000 if you want to have numbers that are easy to read (I outline how this can be done in Calibre in
this post. The point (for me, at least) is to be able to distinguish at a glance the difference between a short story, a novella, short and longer novels, and the bricks that you could use to defend yourself with in a dark alley if it had been a hardcover copy. I use it to decide if my reading list will last me for the holiday, or if I should consider buying/acquiring more books for my reader.
Now for some nitpicking: Word count is a good metric because it gives you the best idea of how long time it'll take you to read the book. It's even better than letter count because you'll read a text that consists of long words in about the same time as you'd read a text containing the same number of shorter words (assuming that you know all those longer words), even if it consists of more letters . For the English language most books will average around 5.5 to 6 letters per word, being it Hemingway, pulp fiction or Dostoevsky. There are other metrics for readability and language complexity, but word count is probably the most accurate for the general case.