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The "new file = new page" is an intrinsic part of EPUB. If you have ever played with a monolithic format such as FB2 where the book is just one long file you would understand why large files are a problem and EPUB breaks them up into effectively segments that a small handheld device can handle.
With FB2 and a long book such as the King James Bible or Seven Pillars of Wisdom it becomes increasingly slow to progress through reading the book and even opening it in the first place can either be glacially slow or even impossible.
While it might be possible to deal with a mega-sized file in FB2 or a single-segment EPUB on a desktop computer with Gigabytes of RAM and the ability to use a swapfile, in reality that's not where you would want to read most Ebooks.
The Terry Pratchett "Discworld" books tend to be, just like "Cousin Pons" unbroken by chapters and too large for a single file. These commercially produced books also have to artificially decide where to split the files with the consequent new page.
As @theducks mentioned before it's a matter of where to split your file and into how many parts, personally I'd want a minimum of four to ensure maximum speed/performance; it's a matter of locating suitable places to do the splitting. The Wikisource version might give some hints with where they have chosen.
BobC
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