Quote:
Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Well, the basic unit of language is arguably the word. Sure words are different lengths but it does average out. Character count isn't reflective of the language nor does it really give a good idea of speed. Speed readers in particular tend to read words as discrete entities whether that word is 1 character long or 9 the word is read at the same speed. Character count tells me nothing useful about the text, word count atleast gives me an idea of how long it is in meaningful units of language. Also, word count produces more manageable values. I'd rather talk about a 150,000 word novel rather than a 1.1 megabyte novel.
By the way, your 1K=1 Page figure seems a little odd. 1K in English works out to about 150 words. That's a really tiny page. If I'm not mistaken the average pocket size paperback is about 500 words to a page.
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Interestingly, scientific studies show that the glyphic role of a word is true for just about everyone but those most determined to violate the pattern. So in other words, everyone reads that way even if they don't read fast. You only delve into a word when you don't know it already, to interpret it, and thus try to decipher its meaning and sound.
So I say, use word counts, learn the general idea of your personal "Words Per Minute" reading speed, and now you can judge what is a long or short book for yourself.
With regards to the concerns about referencing books, that's a more valid concern than anything the OP noted. That is a trivial problem to solve if people actually consistently structured their document itself, however, that doesn't happen, not in fiction anyway. If you read legal drafts or technical documentation, it's always broken down in referenceable units, so much so that you can say "Section 4.1.3.2, Paragraph 3, Sentence 5, Word 7" and be consistent regardless of whether it's printed in one size, or not printed at all.
So if you can get every fiction writer to use exactly the same document structuring concepts, then ok
But even the same story reprinted over time is going to lose page number matching, so you certainly can't count on that. It's easy to forget, but eventually, worthwhile books are printed again, usually with new intros and such, maybe even with minor modifications (See Lord of the Rings as a great example)
Also usage of chapters, chapter breaks, and so on is inconsistent so I'm not so sure that's valuable without a strict formation either. In reality, when we're talking about these sort of old fashioned patterns of reference in the face of modern technology, it's fairly silly. You could easily tell someone to search for the paragraph that starts with "blah" and ends with "blech" and maybe mention it's in a particular chapter, and they can easily use the searching tools of any worthwhile reading app/device to find that exactly paragraph.
Let's not intentionally ignore the conveniences that come right along with the loss of page numbers.