I've noticed lately that the page counts for my Nook e-books very different from the page counts Barnes & Noble and other sites have for the paperback versions. For example, the Plagues of Night E-book has 334 pages, while the ppb has 400 pages, the first Kate Daniels book, Magic Bites, has 205pg in E-book, and the ppb has 272. By far the biggest difference I have come across is the first Wheel of Time novel, Eye of the World, has 2068 pages on my Nook, and 752 pages in ppb. Does anyone know why this is the case? The EotW one seems really weird since it is 2.75 times longer, instead of the others which are all shorter.
There are no "pages" in ebooks. Some ereaders show a "page" number at the bottom but that's just an estimation based on some arbitrary formula just to give you a rough estimation of page count and location within a book. They were never meant to be exact or to correspond to a certain page within the paper version of a book. - Byron
There is no page count, only word count. You can change the font size on an e-reader which makes page numbers irrelevant. The Kindle has a percentage read bar on the bottom.
ADE DOES have a page count. It's based on 1024 bytes of the compressed ePub. When you move from one flow to another, that also changes the page number. The page number in ADE is not based on font size or screen size. Changing the font size does not change the page number. The page number for a given book is constant. So when you see a page number of say 257 for an eBook, it's the same regardless of the font size. The ADE page number does not correspond to the printed editions page number. Even different format print editions (hardcover vs paperback, trade vs mmpb) do not correspond to each other. Given that ADE is the standard for reading ePub, the page numbering used is the standard for ePub.
For ePub (or at least for readers based on Adobe Digital Editions), publishers can configure the book so that the page numbers will line up with the print version. However, I have yet to see a retail title that actually takes advantage of this feature.
I also find, on my iPad's Kobo app that depending on what font size you have the text set at the books will have more pages (for larger text) and less pages (for smaller text).