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Originally Posted by MGlitch
Since we seem to be divided into two camps, the adjust to the future camp, and the stay with the standards camp...
So, these books are, largely, all written on a computer. Likely in MS Word or something (I know George R.R. Martin uses some depreciated word processing program but I'd imagine this holds true even on that.
When you change the font, change the size, change line spacing, change the margins, etc. what happens in these programs? Oh? Does the page count increase?
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WordStar. I still write in the jstar variant of JOE (Joe's Own Editor) because it uses the WordStar keystrokes. And it, like DOS WordStar, uses standard command line, fixed fonts — which is usually a Courier (fixed) font when printed (to paper or PDF). So, yes, the pages are consistent. Double-spaced, about 250 words per page. And they're sent to publishers in this standard manuscript format.
The same thing is true with screenplays. When formatting a screenplay you use a Courier font (10 pitch — 10 characters per inch — on typewriters) now 12 point on computers. The reason you do this is because each page (when properly formatted in screenplay format) equals about one minute of screen time. So a 90 page screenplay works out (approximately) to a 90 minute movie. This is another standard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
If anything that would be the closest representation to a "page" we have for ebooks, since it's a direct correlation to a physical page printed from that computer. Of course you can squeeze a ton of type on it, or expand a single letter to take the whole page. And until you print it out and can no longer adjust it (thus invalidating it as a comparison to a format which can be nigh infinitely adjusted), any change to the type does exactly what the current Kobo software does.
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Except, as mentioned above, writers don't do that. Publishers require a standard manuscript format. If you know what you're doing, you don't experiment with various font faces and sizes. You stick to the standard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
There's your standard: digital pages always adjusted to typographical changes, until ADE came along and derailed the standard. Finally Kobo has returned us to the original standard by which a digital page was measured.
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Except it's not. Digital pages
could be adjusted, but they weren't. Writers still emulate typewritten pages because publishers require a consistent, standard format. ePub and KePub (old scheme) page numbers somehow managed to closely correlate to the number of printed pages in printed books — until now. Now Kobo's KePub scheme is arbitrary and (in my opinion) useless. A "standard" page count based on something that can be changed by any change in font or font size is not a standard. It's a waste of time. Just work by percentages and forget about calling these "page" numbers. At least then it would make sense.
Really it's calling these arbitrary numbers "pages" that bothers me. Call them anything else and it probably wouldn't be as big a deal, but they would still be useless. Kindle used "location" numbers (still does on some books) instead of page numbers. You couldn't correlate them with page numbers either, but at least they were consistent and the location on one Kindle equaled the location on another (even if you changed font size or face).