They are not at all arbitrary – they are 100% precise, and correspond to reality exactly. You flip a page = the page-count goes up or down by exactly 1. That's exactly how it works in printed books, and that's exactly how it should work in e-books, too. Regardless of the size of the printed book, and regardless of the size of your electronic reading device. That's
exactly what
pages are.
There's no need to discard the concept or word "pages". It's an extremely useful and time-honored concept. The only confusion arises when you guys, for some reason unfathomable to me, expect pages to perform what they
never can perform: to be consistent across various layout settings,
or reading devices,
or apps,
or platforms. Why
should they be consistent, for heaven's sake?
Whoever thought of any such requirement? We never expected page-counts to be consistent in the world of
printed books – so why should they, all of a sudden, be consistent in the world of
electronic books?
Once again, for cross-referencing text locations across different layout settings, reading devices, apps, or platforms, I propose to
forget about pages once and for all (but
only for that particular
cross-referencing purpose!), and use the
percentage-into-text (with 2 decimals) metric (based on word counts) instead.