BenG, indeed. There are often multiple printings of the same book with widely different formatting.
This exact problem has bothered me for a long time. I never know how to answer when someone asks "oh, how long is it?" ... "well... um... technically, 700 pages, because that's how many times I will have to press the button on my Sony with the small screen... but... if I had to convert that to paperback book pages?... 300? I guess?"
So yeah, I just look it up on Amazon. People have those boundary conditions already in their heads... you can say 300 pages, but they aren't thinking Stephen King 300 or Umberto Eco 300... they know a general range between those two is how long the book is.
Word count is definitely inefficient. What if you wanted to count? You can count pages pretty easily and that's still how the numbers show up. Hell, even the Bard knew that. The lines are numbered.
There probably needs to be a new measurement/unit for ebooks. I do not have any suggestions for that yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle
rtf
long novel, about 500 kb
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This definitely doesn't work because (anecdotally) I had a huge RTF (14 MB) of what seemed to be only text and formatting of that text which froze my Sony. I tried multiple conversions with no luck. So finally, I converted from RTF (14 MB) to PDF (1.5 MB) then back to RTF.(7 MB).. the resulting file was half the original size, with no obvious formatting changes. WinWord said 400,000 characters - that is nowhere near 7 MB.
Haha, let's count by sentence. David Foster Wallace now has the shortest novel ever, Infinite Jest.