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Originally Posted by Sonist
But, anyway, I am not arguing that there is no market for 5" devices. There is also a market for 3", and probably even 2" devices, but that's irrelevant to a discussion of standards.
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No, because a lot of people do the majority of their digital reading on ~3" screens, which happen to double as phones. A "universal ebook standard" that won't display on an iPhone or Blackberry is a bust.
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Most people tend to gravitate toward an optimum range of sizes, based on field of view and comfort. And 5", or even 6", are not common reading formats, for a reason.
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Yes: because a 6" diagonal pbook, with margins big enough to not have to put fingers over the text, is a much smaller text field. And the costs of paper have a strong influence over the standard sizes of books; smaller pages = more paper/book. Paperbacks are as large as can be made to fit in a pocket, to balance the conflicting challenge of "small and portable" and "cheap to print." And they're all the same size, even when slightly smaller or larger would be better for a particular book, because there are advantages to uniform shapes (shipping, storage, customer familiarity) that don't matter to digital products.
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The smallest common mass market paperback format is approximately 8.25" in diagonal, while a regular trade paperback is just over 10" in diagonal.
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Check the diagonal on the text only, removing the page numbers and headers, which aren't necessary for ebooks.
They're also commonly set in about 10pt font size, even though that's too small for comfortable reading for many people, for reasons that are irrelevant to digital files, which don't get more expensive when they have more pages.
Ebooks are going to be very erratic for a while, as they sort out which features of paper books are needed for useful and enjoyable transfer of the information, and which aspects only existed because the limitations of print required them. And ebooks will discover new features that aren't possible in print--perhaps animated text, or randomly different endings, or video or music excerpts built into the ebook. I'm not fond of the bells-and-whistles approach to ebooks, but I'm glad some people are experimenting with them, because I want them to succeed--and they'll need to be more than "a substitute for pbooks."
The ebook format that works almost exactly like pbook layouts does not have an advantage in trying to find how ebooks work best.