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Old 01-27-2016, 04:31 PM   #8
Caine
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Posts: 14
Karma: 110
Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: .at
Device: Kobo H2O
In my opinion, these stats are useless. Like David I don't like the representation, it's poorly chosen, as evidenced by the attached image.

How does the concept of pages apply to an e-book reader anyway? The number of pages in the print edition might be useful in this regard even though sometimes there are huge differences in font size and line spacing over multiple editions. Maybe there's a magic number of words assumed for a page? A page used to consist of roughly 250 words back when novels were written on typewriters. Today it's somewhere between 250 and 300 words for your regular paperback novel.

I've configured my Kobo in a way that I see roughly the same amount of content as when reading a traditional mass market paperback novel. I know people who use large fonts, a ridiculous amount of line spacing, or huge margins. The same applies to the reading time. I tend to read fiction three to four times faster than nonfiction and almost everybody I know reads much slower than I do.

I also doubt the algorithm is excluding all kinds of front/back matter like huge appendices (roughly 60 pages in Martin's A Dance with Dragons) from these stats, throwing them further off. Statistically not relevant? Maybe.

There are not that many books showing stats, at the moment. Probably depends on the data received from the customers.

To my mind, these are approximations and not stats. For what it's worth, I'm sure I read Ice Station at least twice as fast as I did Half a King. And I was on vacation when I read the latter last year with plenty of time.
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