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Old 09-29-2009, 03:33 PM   #14
Jack Tingle
Punctuation Fetishist
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Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: The Bluest Commonwealth In East America
Device: Kindle PW, Nexus 7 (2013), Galaxy S5 phone, Galaxy Tab 4 8.0
Pages are a chancy concept, to the point that technical documents don't really use them for reference. In general, important text documents with modest graphic content are structured with chapters, paragraphs, figure and table numbers, and such like, when you need to make specific reference.

Novels and short stories usually have chapters and (less commonly) some kind of scene or section breaks. Plays have acts and scenes. The key is matching a semantic structure, not "what page is it on".

Since different printings or versions of the same document can have different material on a given page, unless everyone is not only on the same page, but in the same publication and printing, pages just aren't very useful. I do memorize the page number when I put a book down, but I forget it when I pick it back up. They're not completely useless. As for ebooks, so long as there's some kind of progress indicator (word count, percent, data segments, "pages", etc.) that's adequate.

Now, if you're talking graphic novels, with large amounts of graphic information and limited text, that's a different kettle of fish. In today's world, I wouldn't use any ereader to view those. Magazine page layouts (IIRC, one of your favorite examples) generally annoy me more than inspire me, so I'm not sure they're a good point of argument.

Regards,
Jack Tingle
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