[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ratinox

Faux pages don't tell you this. They present a multiple of some count of characters from some arbitrary position. And the accuracy is questionable. For example, faux page 32 in an ebook with only text and faux page 32 in an ebook with 16 full page illustrations up to that point won't line up.

Regardless of page numbers being arbitrary in ebooks and between different ebooks/editions they still can serve to tell you exactly where you are if a system was devised to calculate it that didn’t rely on word counts or screen sizes. It’d still be an imposed system but it does serve to tell you that you’re ‘x’ pages in out of ‘y’ even if both are made up concepts.

Progress tells you the same information that faux page does if you were to divide the current faux page by the total number of faux pages and then divide by 100. Percentage can with sufficient precision provide the same information that faux page provides while also conveying a reasonable approximation of how much of the book is left in a single number or a position on a slider.

Yes and no, since percent is only given as a whole number in Kobos UI, the larger a book the less accurate percentage will be since each page will count as less and less toward that total. I’m reading a book now which would only see a 1% change after several lengthy chapters. A page number system like ADE would be far more precise.

In fact, some of Adobe's own reference material on ADE says as much. ADE pages are a convenience for typesetters and publishers to give them a rough guide to how many screens full of text an ebook on an ebook reader is. It's marketing. A book won't sell well if customers perceive it as being "too big".

This is very dependent upon the genre of the book. Fantasy, science fiction, and the various non fiction genres don’t suffer nearly as much as general fiction. And is less true for ebooks than physical as a whole since there’s no physical visual reference for the length of an ebook.

If you need actual pages then you should use an image-based format like DjVu or a page definition language format like PDF which offer consistent 1:1 corespondance with their respective print editions and other devices.

I’d agree the only system for page numbers should be something universal one. I’m not going to try and create such a system since I really don’t care about page numbers in my reading. I want a good story not some ego boost of I’m on page 698 of 759. And I’d argue for chapters most are short enough that percentage would suffice, unless the ebook is horribly formatted but that’s a wholly different issue, if percentage alone doesn’t work then percentage and estimated time remaining.

This is a different but related topic. It's where information should be displayed rather than what information is to be displayed.

Honestly I just wanted to condense as much/all of the page number chatter to one thread. If only so other threads could be free of it.