Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
If the reason you are concerned about "length" is that you want to judge how much reading is involved then the only measure of any real use is word count.
Page count is useless as there is no fixed standard for the number of words on a page in printed books and ebooks don't have pages.
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It's true that the only precise, useful metric is word count - especially for web-based works. However, when it goes beyond a few hundred thousands, it can become rather abstract.
What you can do, if you just want a ball-in-the-park (is that the correct expression?) estimation of length, is take the number of characters, divide by a set constant, and you have a useful page count, which is a lot more manageable. Pick a constant close to whatever your reading device uses, and that's even better.
The important thing is to keep the same constant across all your books. That's what the Count Page plugin mentioned by Divingduck does. I told the plugin "here's what my reader uses as a chars-by-page constant", and now I have a column "Pages" in Calibre that's more or less what my reader announces when I open a given book.
N.