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Originally Posted by Katsunami
Kindles have something like location, percentages, and page numbers, but they can't be used to compare books.
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Sure they can. As long as you're comparing apples to apples. Two books with a similar number of locations are similar in "size." A book with more locations than another is "bigger." The comparisons still hold, even if the paradigms our brains are locked into don't allow us to instantly visualize how
much bigger/smaller various books are (yet). But future humans won't have that problem.
Just like we have our own "page" paradigms, there's nothing stopping people from developing their own "average" location-count-per-book statistics. In fact, a locations-based comparison would give just as accurate a picture of the relative "size" of two books, as a comparison made based on a computed "page" count would (more so, actually, if one or more of the ebooks' page-count numbers is tied to a physical book's page-count--which is affected by font-size and margins and line-height and page dimensions). It's just that the scale of a location-based system isn't as intuitive to us as the one that has had a lifetime to become ingrained is. But when it boils down to the numbers, locations give us everything (regarding book-length comparisons) that pages do. If we let them.
Quote:
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If one book is 300 'pages' and another is 400, the latter is 1/3rd longer.
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If one book is 10000 locations and another is 7500, the former is 1/4th smaller.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong; I understand people not
wanting to make adjustments (or not being willing to change their mindsets), but don't confuse "don't want to" with "can't."