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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2642 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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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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