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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2661 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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But even so, extreme outliers are rare.

What are you basing this assertion on?

So if moving to a new metric will still have outliers, why bother?

It irritates me that we insist on using a proxy for the real metric when the real metric is so trivially accessible. To return to the example in the original post: the film's duration is an objective metric for how long it lasts. Some ninety-minute films are a chore to sit through, some films are three-and-a-half hours long but subjectively feel like half that; but at all events, the objective length of the film is a trivial metric to determine. But wouldn't we find it weird if cinemas, distributors, Blu-Ray manufacturers etc. refused to use this metric, and instead were fixated on referring to how many "scenes" or "cuts" a movie has? I mean, sure, either of these is a good enough metric if you assume that a typical movie has X many scenes or X many cuts, but both of these have obvious weaknesses that the metric they're proxies for doesn't have (e.g. there's at least one movie which is nearly two hours long and could be said to only have three scenes total; there are many ninety-minute movies which have far more scenes than some two-hour movies; some movies are ninety or even one hundred and forty minutes long and feature zero cuts), and in any case the objective, unambiguous metric that these are serving as proxies for isn't remotely difficult to determine, so why do you insist on using the proxy metrics anyway?

What are you basing this assertion on?

Extensive personal experience.

It irritates me that we insist on using a proxy for the real metric when the real metric is so trivially accessible.

But that's exactly my point: your proposed metric is a proxy too! What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book". But even for the same reader, two different books with the same word count can have a different time-to-read. Which brings us right back to: we already have a widely accepted proxy, and it is accurate enough that almost nobody cares about the margin of error. So what advantage do we gain from switching to a different proxy measurement? None that I can see, and we incur all the disadvantages that normally come from switching measurements. Doesn't seem very worth it to me.

What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book"

No - what I want is to know how long the book is. Knowing the word count would answer my question exactly, because the length of a book is its word count, in the same way that the duration of a film is how many minutes it takes up (not how many scenes, not how long it feels - just how many minutes). Knowing the word count wouldn't answer the question of how long I can expect it would take me to read it (in the same way that some ninety-minute films can "feel" longer than some films which are two hours long or more), but it would answer the question of how long it is, which is exactly what I want to know. The word count and the page count are both proxy metrics for "how long would the average reader take to read this book"; the page count is an imprecise proxy metric for "how long is this book", which is the word count.

Why word count and not syllable count?

Word count, syllable count and character count would all be equally valid objective metrics for the length of a book, in the sense of how much content it contains. I used word count because it's a standard metric used in numerous contexts (including, obviously, publishing).

*mora count (taking into account differences in syllable length)

In that case, then I still don't see your objection. The page count is in fact an exact metric for how long the book is, just as word count is. It doesn't matter how the size of the type face, or how it's laid out, a given volume is by definition N pages long. You might prefer the metric of word length, but it seems like most others prefer the metric of number of pages. So we aren't going to be switching any time soon.

The page count is in fact an exact metric for how long the book is...

Why is Hamlet 128x as long as Hamlet?

It doesn't matter how the size of the type face, or how it's laid out, a given volume is by definition N pages long.

Me, seeing a conversation piece: That's a great book, I read it back in high school.

SubstantialFrivolity, probably: You must be thinking of something else. This book was printed in 2024. I'm glad you're interested, because it brings up fond memories of my highschool English class where we read a book that contains identical text.

In common conversation, "book" refers to the text. Hamlet is 31,873 words regardless of which physical structure the words are in. Pages can only refer to specific editions of books: The Dover Publications Reprint edition (Sept. 24 1992) of Hamlet is 128 pages, while the One Page Book Company edition is one page.

In common conversation, "book" refers to the text.

That's not true. In common conversation, "book" refers to the text as well as a given volume. You don't say "hey give me that volume of the text of Hamlet over there", you say "hey give me that book over there".

"Book", much like "length", is an overloaded word in the English language. That's why it's not accurate to pick on one particular definition and insist that it's the objectively correct one, the way Folamh did.

In common conversation, "book" refers to the text as well as a given volume. You don't say "hey give me that volume of the text of Hamlet over there", you say "hey give me that book over there".

Alice: "Can you pass the water?"

Bob: "Sure" Splash

Alice: "WTF?"

Bob: "If you wanted the water and the pitcher, you should have asked for them both."

"Book", much like "length", is an overloaded word in the English language. That's why it's not accurate to pick on one particular definition and insist that it's the objectively correct one, the way Folamh did.

I didn't read that from his comments at all. Maybe it was edited out or I missed it downthread.

Amazon lists the length of their books right next to width and height. Did I miss an argument that shipping dimensions should be removed because they aren't "true" length? Was there an argument about film-based movies being measured in "meters" (dependent on frame rate, film size, and runtime)?

From my reading, he wanted an additional piece of information that isn't commonly available, provides some useful information, and has the advantage of being almost entirely invariant through common and irrelevant changes (e.g. new editions of books).

The page count is not an exact metric for how long a book is (i.e. how much content it contains), for the simple reason that the same book can have multiple editions with drastically varying page counts. As outlined in the original post.

The length of a book can refer to physical length as well as how many words it contains. Your argument here is like if one was to insist that we can only use mass, not volume, to talk about how big an object is. Both are equally exact measures of bigness (or book length in our case), they just measure different aspects that the term can refer to.

And also, even if I were to concede the point for sake of argument, it doesn't really make sense to me that you are focusing so hard on just one measure as the legitimate one. You said you aren't trying to determine time-to-read, so what then is the purpose of knowing book length with exactitude? Just the aesthetic satisfaction of having a more objective measurement? It doesn't make sense to me to worry about how exact your measurement is when you don't actually gain anything by it.

what then is the purpose of knowing book length with exactitude?

I'm writing a novel and it would be extremely helpful to me to know the word count of some of my favourite novels, so I can see how mine compares to them from a pacing perspective. In much the same way that directors aim to have the inciting incident by the end of the first reel etc..

Ok, but you surely can appreciate that is not a common use case. So the answer to your original question of "why isn't this commonplace" is "because almost nobody cares". As @Lizzardspawn said, what most people care about when they measure book length is to estimate time-to-read. And for that purpose, page count works just as well as word count.

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