Thursday, March 31, 2011

Length of a novel... Do ebooks have to be the same as printed works?

My current novel is going to work out at around 80,000 to 90,000 words long.  I'll be publishing it on Kindle probably.  Typically novels can be up to half a million or so words in length.  But do ebooks have to conform to the same conventions?

I can not imagine reading a long piece of work on a mobile phone.  I'm not sure what researchers have said about the maximum reading length for ebook readers or computer screens. I am guessing that eink displays may fare better than radiated light screens but there is probably an argument to say that ebooks may need to be shorter than their printed cousins.

Maybe the typical ebook 'novel' will be of the order of 40,000 to 60,000 words? I am not sure if this format would work but I may experiment in this direction.

After all, does anybody really have all the answers?

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