Quote:
Originally Posted by haydnfan
Katsunami, have you done character count per page on the Kindle per font size? If so, would you mind sharing? I'm curious but not curious enough to count it myself.
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I did, somewhere in the past, comparing the fonts on the Kindle to the ones I was editing myself. There should be some posts around here somehwere, stating how many lines and characters per line fit onto a Kindle screen, at least for some of the smaller sizes of some fonts.
I did notice that my ebooks are shorter, compared to paperback versions, because when counting characters, white space is not taken into account. I think I'm going to abandon this year's page count challenge (I'm thousands of pages behind), and recalibrate my library to the current paperback version of The Fellowship of the Ring.
(Even this will not be 100% correct, as my three e-books are actually not three books; they are split off from the e-book which is based on the 50th Anniversary edition of 2004. Strangely enough, my e-books don't seem to contain the errors mentioned in the one star reviews of that edition.)
=== addition ===
I've looked up the page counts of some paperbacks I've owned in the past, trying to find the exact edition, and then hitting that exact page count using the "Count Pages" plugin. I've picked some books I know to have smaller and bigger characters compared to what is normal.
Tolkien, JRR - Fellowship of the Ring: 432 pages, 2735 ch/p
Clavell, James - Shogun: 1152 pages, 2425 ch/p
Brooks, Terry - The Elfstones of Shannara: 576 pages, 2244 ch/p
Eddings, David - Belgarath the Sorceror: 736 pages, 2296 ch/p
Eddings, David - The Diamond Throne: 450 pages, 1945 ch/p
Salvatore, RA - Homeland: 384 pages, 1695 ch/p
The average of the books above is 2223 ch/p. The Salvatore book seems to have huge characters and enormous margins, trying to get it to be a respectable size. At my current setting of 2400 ch/p, the book is only 280 pages long. When using the 2735 ch/p of "The Fellowship of the Ring", the book would have been only 250 pages. Though the editions of FotR and Homeland above would not be far apart in physical size, FotR would take you much more time to read. As you can see, going by page number to point out how long a book will take you to read, is completely useless.
If I leave out the Salvatore book, the average character count is 2329 ch/p. I think the average used by ADE and Calibre, being 2300 ch/p, is right on the money, barring 'special cases' such as FotR or Homeland.
I think I might not even recalibrate my library and just keep it at 2400 ch/p; I've now gotten used to the 'tickness' of my ebooks using that setting.