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Originally Posted by MGlitch
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.
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The only other way I can think to do that is to hard paginate like with PDF. This is a good idea for reference materials. It's a terrible idea for fiction.
What's amusing to me about this is that ADE pages are in fact based on screen size and point size. One ADE page is approximately 1K of text or about 1/4 of one 8.5x11" printed page with 10 point text or about one screen's worth of text on a 6" reader.
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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.
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ADE pages cannot be any more precise because ADE pages and percentages are the same numbers. Don't confuse what the numbers are with how they are displayed. Percentages could easily be displayed with decimal parts. I don't know if this is a good idea or not.
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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.
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A good UI is self-consistent among other things. What you describe is a baked-in inconsistency in what the UI displays if you're using faux pages based on character counts. So this is an argument against faux pages in a general purpose device.
Following your reasoning and tempering with the origin of ADE pages which appear to beloved around here I come to the conclusion that the only self-consistent way to numerically paginate an ebook on an ebook reading device is by page turns.