Quote:
Originally Posted by icallaci
So, this topic haunted my dreams last night, and I came up with this: Last Wednesday, I went to the grocery store and bought apples and oranges. By Sunday, I had eaten 50% of the apples but only 10% of the oranges. How many apples did I eat? How many oranges? Do I need to buy more of either to avoid running out? My point is that percentages are incomplete and meaningless without context.
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But you do have context: you know how many apples and oranges you purchased. If you bought six apples and ate 50% of them then you know you ate three apples.
This works exactly the same with an ebook. If you know a book is 250,000 characters and you've read 15% of the book then you know you've read about 37,500 characters. These are unwieldly numbers so publishers usually count words.
A word is 5 keystrokes in professional typing. It's based on the average lengths of the most commonly used words in the English language. This is the basis of "words per minute" or WPM. I've heard that some publishers use 6 keystrokes/characters per word. Regardless, word count is a thing that generally makes sense to readers: a short novel is about 50K words while a mainstream novel is about twice that. Maybe counting words is the solution.