as i said earlier, there's no real need to provide "justification"
for pagination.  the fact that _some_ people want it is enough
to make us decide that we shouldn't toss out that information.

however, since nobody has mentioned the _best_ justification
for including pagination information, i might as well tell you...

here at the end of the paper-book half-millenium, we have
roughly 10 million different books out there in the world...

(this is according to my memory of recent figures, which may
be off, perhaps even by a large amount, but that's immaterial.)

if we figure there are an average of 1,000 copies of each book,
that means we've got about 10 billion copies of paper-books...

that's a lot of paper-books out there in the world.  a whole lot.

those paper copies are the _originals_, and they always will be.

in the future -- even right now, thanks to google -- we have a
virtually unlimited number of digital copies of those originals.

but again, those digital versions will _always_ be "the copies"...

and the paper-books will _always_ be "the originals"...  forever.

(even books that're "born digital" often become physical quickly,
and that will continue into the far future with print-on-demand;
and paper-books, due to their _physical_and_material_ nature,
will always be the "real" books, while digital versions will always
be the "copies", especially since they can be manipulated at will,
while physical books have the virtue/liability of being "frozen".)

"real" doesn't mean "more valuable" or "more important", it means
_physical_ and _tangible_ and _visible_ and _made_out_of_atoms_.

you really have to ground yourself in this thinking to understand
-- _physical_ books are the "real" ones; digital books are "copies".

that's our first important factor...

and our second important factor is that e-books are manipulatable.

and just as the frozen nature of p-books is both virtue and liability,
so too is this manipulability.  on the one hand, it's easy to fix errors,
provide updates, and so on and so forth...  but, on the other hand,
it's also easy to alter the book in a way the author did not intend...

and if you don't think people _will_ try to rewrite history, you're nuts.

plus there's just sheer incompetence, which has already resulted in
a number of very shoddy digitizations of books, full of inaccuracies.

just try and find all the copies of "pride and prejudice" out there, and
then do a determination on which ones are "accurate" and which not.
you will find this task to be overwhelming, and nearly impossible, and
that's just one book out of our 10 million books.  that is the problem.

so there's little question that people in the future will be _skeptical_
about each and every e-book which they are handed, and rightly so...
for reasons from accidental to quite intentional, it might be inaccurate.

so we have a state where there are some "known" p-book "originals",
and a ton of digital "copies" that might or might not be "trustworthy".

(i believe jon noring has been absent from here for long enough that
it's once again safe to use that word without all his derogatory spin.)

now, there's only one solution to this state.  any specific digital copy
will have to be able to _prove_ its correspondence to a paper-copy...

the easiest way to provide such proof is to assume the same form as
the paper-copy; that is, it must adopt the linebreaks and pagination,
so that each and every page can be subjected to visual confirmation...

of course, in order to have value as a digital book, the file must be
able to drop the linebreaks/pagination, and assume another form,
one that reflows to the current set of desires of the end-user, _but_
it _must_ be able to mimic the look-and-feel of the paper-book too.

if it cannot, it's simply going to be discarded as being untrustworthy.

your e-book cannot afford to be nothing more than a formless blob.
it _must_ be able to "snap to" a form that exactly imitates the p-book.
and for it to be able to do that, you must keep linebreaks/pagination.

it's really that simple.

-bowerbird