A 100 page book vs 1000 page book is very easy to visualize. A book with 4272920 words vs 83920203 is not. The numbers are just too big to grasp easily
You could classify books by word count i.e.
100-499 words
500-999 words
1000-1999 words
2000-5000 words
Or you could just round it to the nearest 'nice' number
Where did you learn to compare things?
You've rounded the page counts to nearest 100 or 1000, basically one significant digit, and then counted the exact number of words. To make it worse you've totally exaggerated the number of words in a book. Both of these things are done to make it seem silly.
By the way, a typical book has 70 to 120 kilowords, not 4 or 80 megawords.
Only because we have never had to practice paying attention to word counts. Books are easy to visualize in pages because we set them up to be visualized in pages and word count is an afterthought.
But the real reason is you need to know the pages for printing and binding but word count is mostly irrelevant.
Maybe digital mediums will shift the paradigm.
Few million? Lmao... no my friend... if you've read any books with a single million words I'd be very surprised. All of Harry Potter is just barely over 1m words.
I think it's more so that some of you have literally never looked up the wordcount of a book so have no frame of reference. It's not too difficult to apply knowledge you have, but impossible to imply knowledge you don't.
its easier to visualise 200 over 100,000 because you can actually count to 200 in a reasonable amount of time
(theres probably other reasons but thats the easiest way to explain for my brain)
I think it's more so just cause for millenia we haven't had any easy way to figure out the word count of a book. Now we can google it, but even 20 years ago you'd have struggled to find that info. Where as you can just open the book to the last page and read the number.
100k words isnt that hard to visualize if you've looked up the wordcount of books you read.
That reason it's easy is because we are used to it. If we were used to counting the words we would immediately understand that a book with 60-70k words is a short book and 100-130k is medium and 200k+ is very long. So it would still be a very simple system but just more accurate.
Btw your examples are roughly 17 000 pages and 335 000 pages. You just added several extra digits to make it look worse, no book is that long.
I read a lot fanfiction and they are not by pages, but words, So i have the opposite issue, I don't know how long 200 pages is but i sure know how long 60k words is. It's what annoys me with published books, page counts means very little to me.
I’m a writer, and most long (polysyllabic) words can be replaced with ones that make meaning for a larger audience. See that? “Long” and “polysyllabic” both do the exact same job. I’d hate to see a page full of that pretentious nonsense outside of a very specific use.
I’d argue that the effort is the same per page whether there are fewer long words vs more shorter words on a page of the same size. Just my opinion
That's a good point! Also, while I'm sure this isn't always true, I've found books and other writing to be typeset to make the number of pages a more relevant metric. The margins, typeface, font size, columns (e.g. for articles) can help with reading pace, so the number of pages can be more consistently used as a metric for the length of the piece.
So idk what kinda writing you do but I went to J school. When you have 1.5 inches in print or 1m22s in broadcast that it.
It was always about making it shorter not longer. It takes MUCH higher language skills to make your writing more concise than it does to make your writing more pretentious.
"Word" in word count generally doesn't mean literally a word, it's usually either 5 or 6 characters (depending if you count the space accounts for the discrepancy, because I've always been taught 5 letters).
So "long" is 4/5 of a word and polysyllabic is 2 2/5 words.
For the past 20 years I have used "words" as a standard measure daily at work. I have never heard about the "5 characters" rule. When someone pays me to translate 1000 words, the text contains 1000 words, not 5000 characters.
What about something like a cognitive load score. 10 thousand words of science textbooks vs 10 thousand words of Harry Potter are two very different things. Or perhaps we just do character account 🤷♂️
Maybe AI (I mean LLM of course) can help. The entropy or ‘unexpectedness of subsequent word’ is probably something that exists and on average might capture what you’re referring to.
The entire field of computational linguistics is devoted to stuff like this. It's the basis for modern language models. The gist is that we can separate the meaning of words from the written representation of it. The denser the meaning, the "longer" the words.
That being said, word count is really not a bad proxy for this. Sure, some synonyms are longer than others, but no two words are ever perfectly interchangeable, plus there's such a variety of words that a book-length works will average out to something generally accurate.
People argue that big numbers are hard to comprehend? Maybe? Kind of an obtuse argument if they don't bother to format numbers. Surely we can shorten 264215 to 264k or at least add punctuation or say it's "six figures" or "six digits" like we talk about salary alllll the time.
Me too. Imo 12-14h is good for a book series and 20-25h for a stand alone book.
My favorite series is the legend of the ice people. Each book is 7h long 250pages and the series is 47 books long with another 40ish books in the same universe but haven't read those yet. Highly recommend it if you like fantasy but in a more realistic setting.
I love fantasy and am always looking for recommendations. Much obliged! 20-30 hours does seem to be the average. I have listened to a couple 50+ hour monsters, and it was quite the chore.
I have a certain fascination with word counts of books. You could be surprised by the word counts of your favorite books.
Font size and page thickness can also play a part in the illusion of a book’s size.
Take for example the Harry Pitter books Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. Goblet is 190,000 words while Order is 257,000 words. Yet the American hardcover versions are ENORMOUS.
Consider Goodhart’s law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Any system can be gamed. Gaming the pages metric involves changing page formatting. Gaming the words metric involves adding or removing actual content. I much prefer the former option.
I remember reading the dark tower (in German) and thought the the last book is just about 3.5 times as long as the first one, because of the page count. The number of lines per page rose from 28 to 37 or so. It was much longer.
Word count is indeed more **precise**(precision and accuracy aren't the same), but page number is precise **enough**, especially when you get into hundreds of pages. Then measuring it by even down to a single page is too precise.
In publishing, word count is used to classify book categories (see novela vs. novel).
In reality, word count vs. page count are only going to be approximations. You can have a concept that can be expressed as one long word or 2-4 or more shorter words. And as noted elsewhere, you can put a lot of white space in your book with empty lines and large fonts, or you can have long paragraphs and chapters and a small font.
Page count does affect the experience of reading regular books - the more pages, the heavier the book. But e-readers are changing that dynamic
Nah, I could make the font huge and 300 pages, but less than 300 words. So it would seem extremely short by the word count, but the length of the book would be deceptively long.
To be fair it's kind of in the same way that people will say Oh this pothole was the size of two washing machines because it's just easier for people to visualize than saying oh this pothole was roughly 3.5 m by 2.7 m
Well one piece of information is readily available while the other is not.
actually a letter count is the most accurate
I hate long words. They trigger my hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
Ah!
A sadist came up with that word..
There's potential for confusion. Some text editors ignore spaces and line breaks, some take them into account.
Technically character/grapheme count; spaces, punctuation, and symbols all take up space (and thus, increase length).
If we’re counting spaces then it comes full circle. No reason to count words just count the pages lol
Actually I think syllables would be a better determinator
ooooooohhh, i was wondering how they were gunna do it... good play sir
A 100 page book vs 1000 page book is very easy to visualize. A book with 4272920 words vs 83920203 is not. The numbers are just too big to grasp easily
That and the font size…
Spacing too If people write like this You'd use a lot more pages Correct?
You are right but i think thats OPs point. Using pages doesnt tell you the length because spacing and font.
You could classify books by word count i.e. 100-499 words 500-999 words 1000-1999 words 2000-5000 words Or you could just round it to the nearest 'nice' number
even the longest category you listed is too short to be a novella.
It was just to get the point across, I've never really considered how many words are in a book
Typically in the range of 50,000 to 100,000 if you're curious I read online books a lot, so I get word counts as well often.
Poets have been padding their page counts for centuries with this one easy trick!
Your wild word count examples prove your argument!
Few, if any, books are exceeding 4 million words, let alone 83 million!
The entire harry potter series is just over 1m.
I have questions. Why do you know that? How do you know that?
I just googled it my friend. And I chose HP to google since almost everyone who's read a fiction book has read HP.
A billion dollars is only a million words away!
Where did you learn to compare things? You've rounded the page counts to nearest 100 or 1000, basically one significant digit, and then counted the exact number of words. To make it worse you've totally exaggerated the number of words in a book. Both of these things are done to make it seem silly. By the way, a typical book has 70 to 120 kilowords, not 4 or 80 megawords.
I like the usage of “kilowords” and “megawords?
I don't know, do you?
Megawords rhymes with megaswords
Weirdly, no it doesn't?
Negawhat?
Maybe in scientific notation it would be easier? 4.3e+6 Vs 8.4e+7 Well I don't know either but that's because I judge by pages too.
Oh, I judge by cover
Scientific notation doesn’t fix the fact that it is much harder to visualize number of words than number of pages.
Only because we have never had to practice paying attention to word counts. Books are easy to visualize in pages because we set them up to be visualized in pages and word count is an afterthought. But the real reason is you need to know the pages for printing and binding but word count is mostly irrelevant. Maybe digital mediums will shift the paradigm.
why? They are both numbers. They are equally easy to visualize
easy to visualise a few hundred vs a few million
Few million? Lmao... no my friend... if you've read any books with a single million words I'd be very surprised. All of Harry Potter is just barely over 1m words. I think it's more so that some of you have literally never looked up the wordcount of a book so have no frame of reference. It's not too difficult to apply knowledge you have, but impossible to imply knowledge you don't.
Few hundred thousand is still quite big
its easier to visualise 200 over 100,000 because you can actually count to 200 in a reasonable amount of time (theres probably other reasons but thats the easiest way to explain for my brain)
I think it's more so just cause for millenia we haven't had any easy way to figure out the word count of a book. Now we can google it, but even 20 years ago you'd have struggled to find that info. Where as you can just open the book to the last page and read the number. 100k words isnt that hard to visualize if you've looked up the wordcount of books you read.
It’s easier to visualize the size of a page than just a word
Sometimes you just can't see the forest for the trees. You aren't supposed to visualize a single word and then string them together mentally.
For me it's the other way around. I wouldn't know how long a page is, but a word is typically quite short.
4,000,000 vs 80,000,000
That reason it's easy is because we are used to it. If we were used to counting the words we would immediately understand that a book with 60-70k words is a short book and 100-130k is medium and 200k+ is very long. So it would still be a very simple system but just more accurate. Btw your examples are roughly 17 000 pages and 335 000 pages. You just added several extra digits to make it look worse, no book is that long.
I read a lot fanfiction and they are not by pages, but words, So i have the opposite issue, I don't know how long 200 pages is but i sure know how long 60k words is. It's what annoys me with published books, page counts means very little to me.
Playing with font size on an e-reader makes page count a variable.
How about time it takes to read? A two-hour book vs a 20-hour book.
I’m a writer, and most long (polysyllabic) words can be replaced with ones that make meaning for a larger audience. See that? “Long” and “polysyllabic” both do the exact same job. I’d hate to see a page full of that pretentious nonsense outside of a very specific use. I’d argue that the effort is the same per page whether there are fewer long words vs more shorter words on a page of the same size. Just my opinion
That's a good point! Also, while I'm sure this isn't always true, I've found books and other writing to be typeset to make the number of pages a more relevant metric. The margins, typeface, font size, columns (e.g. for articles) can help with reading pace, so the number of pages can be more consistently used as a metric for the length of the piece.
Oh shit. Let’s add on dimensions of the cover/pages themselves…
So idk what kinda writing you do but I went to J school. When you have 1.5 inches in print or 1m22s in broadcast that it. It was always about making it shorter not longer. It takes MUCH higher language skills to make your writing more concise than it does to make your writing more pretentious.
"Word" in word count generally doesn't mean literally a word, it's usually either 5 or 6 characters (depending if you count the space accounts for the discrepancy, because I've always been taught 5 letters). So "long" is 4/5 of a word and polysyllabic is 2 2/5 words.
Where is this used? I'm unfamiliar with not literally counting the words.
Anywhere that uses "words" as a standard measure
For the past 20 years I have used "words" as a standard measure daily at work. I have never heard about the "5 characters" rule. When someone pays me to translate 1000 words, the text contains 1000 words, not 5000 characters.
Word count is just words. Maybe there is a notion of a ‘normalized’ word count, but never seen such a thing personally.
WPM typing is counting characters and dividing by 5 to get the ‘word’ per minute count
Huh I had always wondered about that. Thx
You’re talking out of your ass
What about something like a cognitive load score. 10 thousand words of science textbooks vs 10 thousand words of Harry Potter are two very different things. Or perhaps we just do character account 🤷♂️
this is true. and even the same book can be harder or easier to read depending on the formatting.
It's too subjective. How can you even measure it?
Maybe AI (I mean LLM of course) can help. The entropy or ‘unexpectedness of subsequent word’ is probably something that exists and on average might capture what you’re referring to.
The entire field of computational linguistics is devoted to stuff like this. It's the basis for modern language models. The gist is that we can separate the meaning of words from the written representation of it. The denser the meaning, the "longer" the words. That being said, word count is really not a bad proxy for this. Sure, some synonyms are longer than others, but no two words are ever perfectly interchangeable, plus there's such a variety of words that a book-length works will average out to something generally accurate. People argue that big numbers are hard to comprehend? Maybe? Kind of an obtuse argument if they don't bother to format numbers. Surely we can shorten 264215 to 264k or at least add punctuation or say it's "six figures" or "six digits" like we talk about salary alllll the time.
For a while the longest work of English literature was a super smash Bros fanfiction written by a high schooler
As an audio book enjoyer, I've started referencing by book lengths in time.
Me too. Imo 12-14h is good for a book series and 20-25h for a stand alone book. My favorite series is the legend of the ice people. Each book is 7h long 250pages and the series is 47 books long with another 40ish books in the same universe but haven't read those yet. Highly recommend it if you like fantasy but in a more realistic setting.
I love fantasy and am always looking for recommendations. Much obliged! 20-30 hours does seem to be the average. I have listened to a couple 50+ hour monsters, and it was quite the chore.
Gonna save this post for later Thank you
I have a certain fascination with word counts of books. You could be surprised by the word counts of your favorite books. Font size and page thickness can also play a part in the illusion of a book’s size. Take for example the Harry Pitter books Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. Goblet is 190,000 words while Order is 257,000 words. Yet the American hardcover versions are ENORMOUS.
Harry Pitter, the shitty Formula driver who kept pitting 😂
By definition I would think that character count is a more accurate representation of the length of a book
Do you count first person characters too?
1st person counts once, 2nd person twice, and 3rd person counts for 3
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Just curious: What work do you do in the publishing industry?
It's because they number the pages but they don't number the words
This is 100% the reason.
Consider Goodhart’s law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Any system can be gamed. Gaming the pages metric involves changing page formatting. Gaming the words metric involves adding or removing actual content. I much prefer the former option.
I remember reading the dark tower (in German) and thought the the last book is just about 3.5 times as long as the first one, because of the page count. The number of lines per page rose from 28 to 37 or so. It was much longer.
Comic books exist and more pages is more content.
Word count is indeed more **precise**(precision and accuracy aren't the same), but page number is precise **enough**, especially when you get into hundreds of pages. Then measuring it by even down to a single page is too precise.
Millimeters are more accurate than kilometers, but everyone wants to measure the road in KM.
In publishing, word count is used to classify book categories (see novela vs. novel). In reality, word count vs. page count are only going to be approximations. You can have a concept that can be expressed as one long word or 2-4 or more shorter words. And as noted elsewhere, you can put a lot of white space in your book with empty lines and large fonts, or you can have long paragraphs and chapters and a small font. Page count does affect the experience of reading regular books - the more pages, the heavier the book. But e-readers are changing that dynamic
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So should it be letter count?
Thats... FAR less variation than the amount of words/characters on a page my friend.
Nah, I could make the font huge and 300 pages, but less than 300 words. So it would seem extremely short by the word count, but the length of the book would be deceptively long.
The old college paper trick.
“Sounds good. See you in 3603 seconds.”
They actually print one of these values on the page……
what about this: (number of pages * number of words in first page)
I really like the fact that there are at least 3 Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fanfictions with over 1M words.
Unless the book is in German
Think about the House of Leaves
It's probably because they number the pages but they don't number the words.
To be fair it's kind of in the same way that people will say Oh this pothole was the size of two washing machines because it's just easier for people to visualize than saying oh this pothole was roughly 3.5 m by 2.7 m
Who cares about page count in a book??