I switched to page count this year because of the variance in book length and I'm loving it. I actually am grouping page counts into "books" so that I can still count by books, but this time every "book" is exactly the same length.
It turned out to be a tad more work to keep track of and calculate than I had thought, but I still really like it.
As far as how often we update our lists here, I've been very naughty this year so far but I plan to get to it eventually. Last year I was much better about it, but last year I read less books in a year than this year I have in three months so far, so I suppose I had more time to update my list then.