[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Not true. There is nothing "subjective" about flipping a page and seeing the page-count go up or down by exactly 1 every time, regardless of your screen size or layout settings. That is 0% subjective, and 100% objective.

Well, except for the part where it is subjectively your opinion that a page should be exactly 1 per user-defined screenful of text.

I still don't understand what you find valuable about that sort of metric, given how arbitrary it is, in comparison to all the other arbitrary metrics out there, but I don't suppose I will get a good explanation any time soon anyway.

Also, an e-book does not "change page numbering all by itself". Never. It can only do so if the user initiates that, by changing his or her layout settings – so that it then does not really occur "by itself". Changing layout settings in an e-book amounts to a reprinting of a traditional book – and there is no obligation for reprintings to follow the page numberings of previous editions.

Sure, in the thinnest, most narrow-minded view of things.

But given that an ebook is fundamentally designed for reflowability, I would argue that changing the layout settings is an intrinsic part of the book.
An intrinsic part of the book that then causes the page numbering to change is pretty "all by itself" in my mind.

I don't see any baggage. If there is any baggage, it's being artificially added by folks suffering under the delusion discussed earlier – that pages in electronic books can be in any way useful for cross-referencing text locations between various layout settings, reading devices, e-reader apps, or platforms. It simply needs to be explained to all such folks that this cannot be accomplished, and that's it. Just as pages are useless for cross-reference purposes in printed books unless everyone uses the exact same printed edition, they are equally useless in electronic books. There's no mystery there – move along, please. The only thing pages are good for in electronic books is the same thing that they are good for in printed books: they give you an idea as to where you are inside the book as you're reading through it.

Wait, are you arguing that the only thing page numbers in printed books are good for also, is to give you an idea as to where you are in it?

Regardless, the baggage is there, I've seen a lot of it in many people, and if you actually believe that you can simply explain it to them and they will snap out of their "delusion", then you are a bigger fool than I think. Because people really aren't that fixable.

E-books are a relatively recent phenomenon; most people on this planet don't have a clue what an e-book is. And many of those who are convinced they know what e-books are, don't have a clue either. (They consider PDF files to be e-books, for example.)

Um, well, yeah. Because PDF is an ebook format, on account of they can contain the contents of a book and they are electronic.

It isn't a very good format, mind you. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, merely that it shouldn't exist.

So, we just need to be patient. Enlightenment doesn't come easily or overnight. It simply needs to be explained, patiently, over and over again, that pages are useless for cross-referencing purposes in e-books. After everyone gets that, pages in e-books can finally be what they truly are – pages. No more – no cross-referencing aid.

Get back to me when you've succeeded convincing them. And I will freely agree to call your arbitrary reference locators "pages".

(For cross-referencing purposes in e-books, I tirelessly promote the entirely new metric of percentage-into-text, with 2 decimals, based on word count. That is a cross-layout, cross-device, cross-platform metric, and far more precise than pages in printed books ever were. Although it can't be a 100% precise metric, either, of course. Once people understand that the percentage indicator is far more useful for cross-referencing purposes than pages ever were or ever can be, then people can finally let pages be what they are – just pages on the current reading device using its current layout settings, with no usefulness whatsoever for cross-referencing purposes.)

There are actually some nice standards for specifying location in a very fine-grained manner which is vastly superior to your proposal. e.g. http://www.idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html

The only problem is that no one actually uses it.
So why would they be any more likely to use your percentage-into-text metric?