Thread: Page Numbers, Percentage, or nothing at all
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Old 10-10-2019, 08:59 PM   #158
rcentros
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop View Post
This whole argument just seems so silly. Aside from scholarly/research use (which, let's be honest: none of us are discussing), why isn't 'one screenful of words = one page" perfectly valid?
Not if I want to know the comparative length of a book. My daughter wanted me to read a book titled Social. So I bought it from Kobo. Amazon shows the hardback and paperback versions of this book to both be 384 pages. The KePub version of this book on my Mini is 400 pages. I made an ePub version of the book, which came out to 407 pages (which is constant on my Sony, Tolino and Nook). This is relative correlation. By looking at either the KePub (in the old scheme) or the ePub I can get a decent idea of how long the book is. With the new Kobo firmware, the book is 862 pages... unless I change the font (not size) from Georgia to Malabar, now it's 994 pages. But Malabar looks a little big, so I take it down a notch, now it's 835 pages. I don't want Malabar after all, so I switch to Open Dyslexic, not it's 727 pages. It's a bit small, so I tick the font size up a notch and we're back to 862 pages. Tick it up another notch and I'm at 1007 pages. In other words, no correlation whatsoever to the paperback or hardback books. (Or even to itself.) I don't like it. Why bother with "page" numbers at all? Just go with percentages when the "page" numbers are meaningless and arbitrary.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop View Post
Books change page count depending on their format and the size of the font used.

To use a popular example: Stephen King's It
Hardcover (original) - 1138 pages
Hardcover (current) - 1168 pages
Trade paperback (2016) - 1168 pages
Trade paperback (2019) - 1184 pages
Mass market paperback (1987) - 1104 pages
Mass market paperback (2016) - 1488 pages
Kindle - 1169 pages
Yeah, but you're talking about different editions, not the same edition released at the same time on different formats. There may even be (probably is, considering this is Stephen King) editorial changes in the different editions. It's not a one for one comparison.
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