Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Actually, since apparently scrolls have pages too, my comparison makes less sense than I initially thought... while my questioning of the presumed discarding of the page paradigm probably makes even more sense... pages having been seen useful and/or necessary even before scrolls became books. |
Yeah, scrolls have pages. They have pages because they're manufactured by taking individual pieces of parchment, papyrus, whatever and gluing or otherwise securing them together on the edges. Where the edges of the pages meet forms a slight barrier for writing on them. As a consequence you end up treating each page as a discrete entity. Not at all unlike the pages of a book. In fact the first books/codices were made by cutting scrolls at those break points.
Anyrate, I don't see pages going away. However I don't think that pages should be conceptualized the same way for an ebook as for a paper book. I especially don't think ebook pages should be forced to have a 1:1 correspondence to their paper counterparts. In the future a page will probably be a single screen full on whatever device its being read on.
What are the advantages of pages anyway? One I can think of is the ability to cite references to individual pages. I see this as less useful with an ebook where pages are going to be somewhat dynamic. Paragraph numbers within chapters might be best. Rather than referring to page 127 we'd instead refer to Ch. 5 Paragraph 11. Maybe even write that as something like Ch. 5-11 or some such. It'd allow greater precision. And as I recall from my schooling we often ended up referring to page and paragraph as counted from top to bottom on the page so this wouldn't be too different. We just need the devices to report paragraph numbers.
Coming back around to the thread topic I still think word count is the best way to really gauge the length of a text.