More and more frequently I have been noticing a trend with the ebooks that I purchase/download. My nook seems to have trouble figuring out how many pages a particular book actually has. I am curious as to whether this is a nook thing or a general ebook reader thing. My thoughts would lean towards the former.

Let me explain the situation. This doesn’t happen with all books, but I notice it quite often enough to have a bug in my brain about it. Basically, when going through pages in a book, I find that every so often you have to go through two pages before the nook’s page counter will go up in number. It’s not a huge issue, but one that I, for whatever reason, get aggravated with on occasion because I feel like I’m not making much headway in a book. I have at least one theory as to why this phenomenon occurs.

The number of words displayed on a nook page is not the same amount of words that would be in a physical book’s page. Look at The God Delusion, for example. The paper versions (hardback and paperback) range from 416 to 464 pages, respectively. The nook’s version lists a solid 433. I say a “solid 433″ because no matter how you change the font or change the size of the font, the final page tally on the nook never changes. That may very well be the answer to my riddle, as a larger font, for example, would invariably require more page turns to equal the same amount of words read that a “normal” sized font would display. Going the other direction: I generally keep my nook on the “very small” font setting, and my current novel has no trouble keeping up with pages. They are one-for-one, so to speak. Yet a similar sized font in another book can give you a two-for-one. All very peculiar.

I find it interesting that the device would have you turn several pages to equal one full numbered page. Would it not be easier to simply recount the number of pages? Well, it may not, actually. If you change a font size, there’s a ton of text between page 1 and page 500 for the device to process to figure out that it now only takes 400 clicks to read through. On that front, having additional page turns makes sense, although how does it still know that to get to the next page, I’ll need to push the button twice? There is some counting going on inside of there regardless of the situation. Maybe it just fudges the numbers and thinks to itself “Well, I think that it’ll be X amount of pages. As I get closer to the end I’ll make sure the book still ends on page 500…”

This whole situation is possibly why there is no option to easily go to a direct page. You can add bookmarks to pages which essentially does this task, but not retroactively. If you finish a novel and for some reason remember a quote you wanted from a certain page, you can’t just search for page 200, you have to find the chapter and then turn pages until to get to what you want. Not a huge gripe (you should have bookmarked and noted that page to begin with), but interesting to think about.

Being one, and I think the only person I know, who likes to keep tabs on the total pages I read (I have a spreadsheet and everything!), I wish there was a better way for the nook to more accurately display accurate page numbers. In the end, when writing down page numbers for my spreadsheet, I generally just write down what page number the nook displays, so it really isn’t a huge hassle. I would just like to understand the methodology behind how the device counts the pages.

Now the question turns to you. If you’ve had experience with other ebook readers (Kindle, Sony Reader, iPad), do they do the same thing?