Quote:
Originally Posted by ratinox
It's interesting that you mention scrolls because scrolls are a closer physical analogue to ebooks than bound, square cut sheaves of paper. In fact, we use a verbified form of the word to denote the moving of text across a display. Of course, measuring ebooks in terms of inches makes about as much sense as measuring them in terms of pages.
Newspaper columns in the US are measured in inches.
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Exactly, I think I used a similar example with Jon somewhere in the mess of all this. Many ereader apps scroll up and down further increasing the similarities. Though some have gone the way of simulating a page turn it only makes it plainer to me that it’s a screen not a page since nothing actually is flipped it’s just an illusion.
And yes measuring an ebook in inches is pointless we’d be in the same spot we are now since different sized screens, settings etc would throw it all off.
The more I think about it the more word count seems to be the best measure. No matter the size of the screen or your settings if you’re 10,000 words in to a book you’d be 10,000 words in on any device. It’d be consistent between books save for those with images which have no text description by them. And it’s easy enough to abbreviate the numbers into a more manageable form than 1,986,876 while still being precise.