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Zoot · 11-25-2007, 02:34 PM

Ok, I did some research using Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson, which is available on the kindle and also as a "Search Inside" pbook at Amazon which means they provide text statistics for it.

The ebook includes additional material so they aren't identical (I tried to compensate for this by using the Kindle "page" number at the end of the regular text where applicable).

Here are some numbers:

Characters per Kindle "page": 133
Words per Kindle "page": 23
Kindle "pages" per paperback edition page: 14.8
Compressed Kindle ebook bytes per Kindle "page": 109.

Based on the search behavior I was expecting a Kindle "page" to simply be a chunk of 64 bytes of the uncompressed text data, but the number came out closer to 128 bytes and not quite close enough to be sure that's what it's doing rather than some variable-length magical computation. But since it doesn't seem to be correlated to anything else, my guess at this point is that a page may indeed just be 128 bytes (or characters) of book data, and the number varies a little based on embedded formatting data etc.

Z.

11-25-2007, 02:34 PM	#8
Zoot Connoisseur Posts: 89 Karma: 34 Join Date: Nov 2006 Device: Amazon Kindle	Ok, I did some research using Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson, which is available on the kindle and also as a "Search Inside" pbook at Amazon which means they provide text statistics for it. The ebook includes additional material so they aren't identical (I tried to compensate for this by using the Kindle "page" number at the end of the regular text where applicable). Here are some numbers: Characters per Kindle "page": 133 Words per Kindle "page": 23 Kindle "pages" per paperback edition page: 14.8 Compressed Kindle ebook bytes per Kindle "page": 109. Based on the search behavior I was expecting a Kindle "page" to simply be a chunk of 64 bytes of the uncompressed text data, but the number came out closer to 128 bytes and not quite close enough to be sure that's what it's doing rather than some variable-length magical computation. But since it doesn't seem to be correlated to anything else, my guess at this point is that a page may indeed just be 128 bytes (or characters) of book data, and the number varies a little based on embedded formatting data etc. Z.