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Old 05-27-2012, 08:59 AM   #12
VydorScope
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw View Post
I suspect that, if nothing else, the American influence here is strong enough that most people remain familiar with terms like feet, and miles and so on. More particularly, I wonder how American audiences find reading books that use metres and litres and so on. How much does that distract from your reading?
I think these days most Americans are used to 2 systems existing, but only think in feet/inches. My son is in 3rd grade and they are still teaching feet/inches/etc as the primary measurement... but for some reason we buy our soda in liters! Milk, juice, etc is in gallons/quarts... but not soda. It is the only exception I can think of.

I am a scifi author so I use metric system in my books, and most scifi seems to use metric. So genre of your writing is a bit of a factor. I would suggest avoiding a mix though as many readers will think it was a mistake.

100 feet = roughly 33.33 meters so you could say "many tens of meters"?
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