Accurate book length

[Tanjamuse]

What would be the best way to calculate the accurate book length?

Word Count? Page Count? Or yet another option?

[DrChiper]

Try percentage.
IMHO everything else is useless for e-books.

[Tanjamuse]

How would you do that? It's not a matter of how much of the book I've read, it's the length of the book as it is.

[DrChiper]

Then try to define your interpretation of the word "book length" and you have your answer.
Hint: Byte, characters, words, sections, chapters are all valid here as they are reasonable fixed entities. Not so for "pages" as they tend to depend on several variables like line-spacing, font-size, screen-size to name a few.

Further, it also depends on what you want to do with that info. To determine the virtual thickness of the e-book in the sense that "big" means a lot of reading pleasure (or not )?

Personally, I'm never interested in book lengths: it's the book contents whats make me decide whether I will read it from front to back, or just some snippets.

Just my 2cts.

[Divingduck]

@Tanjamuse,
there is always discussion around this topic. Maybe a good starting point for you is the plugin count page

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Tanjamuse

What would be the best way to calculate the accurate book length?

Word Count? Page Count? Or yet another option?

If the reason you are concerned about "length" is that you want to judge how much reading is involved then the only measure of any real use is word count.

Page count is useless as there is no fixed standard for the number of words on a page in printed books and ebooks don't have pages. Physical size of the file for an ebook is also a poor judge, no better than judging a printed book by its weight. There are too many things that add to file size (e.g. fonts, CSS code, images, ...) that add to the size but don't alter the amount of reading involved.

[aleyx]

Originally Posted by dwig

If the reason you are concerned about "length" is that you want to judge how much reading is involved then the only measure of any real use is word count.

Page count is useless as there is no fixed standard for the number of words on a page in printed books and ebooks don't have pages.

It's true that the only precise, useful metric is word count - especially for web-based works. However, when it goes beyond a few hundred thousands, it can become rather abstract.

What you can do, if you just want a ball-in-the-park (is that the correct expression?) estimation of length, is take the number of characters, divide by a set constant, and you have a useful page count, which is a lot more manageable. Pick a constant close to whatever your reading device uses, and that's even better.

The important thing is to keep the same constant across all your books. That's what the Count Page plugin mentioned by Divingduck does. I told the plugin "here's what my reader uses as a chars-by-page constant", and now I have a column "Pages" in Calibre that's more or less what my reader announces when I open a given book.

N.

[Tanjamuse]

Thanks everybody. I'll try out the Word Count plugin.

[theducks]

A phrase from a movie comes to mind:

"Try and use big words"
IMHO, Page/word count is only meaningful if the content is similar.

My speed varies (fastest to slowest):
Fiction: US (modern spelling) English
Fiction: US dialect English
Fiction: UK/AU (modern) English
Non-Fiction -Technical oriented

Since my first device was MRSDK based, I set my Page count to Adobe method

File size is distorted by so many things, that only very tiny files compare well.

[DrChiper]

Originally Posted by theducks

IMHO, Page/word count is only meaningful if the content is similar.
[...snip]...
File size is distorted by so many things, that only very tiny files compare well.

True, very true. And just imagine the file size when you have an e-book with lots of pictures in it ...

So in the end, may we conclude that even "word count" is actually just meaningless, unless of course when you are paid per word ?