the hacker said:

Your page numbers don't correlate to anything, except an "Oh thats neat!" kind of feeling as you imagine what it would be like to be reading page 423 in the printed (dead-tree) version of that particular work. Page 423 in your numbering scheme is not the 423'd page as seen in my browser.

actually, having a solid congruence between our information as it exists as ink-on-paper and as it exists when displayed on-screen will ultimately prove to be far more crucial than merely a "oh, that's neat" kind of feeling. it doesn't have to be a 1-to-1 congruence, but some kind of major ratio is important. it might be 1-to-2, where one printed page equals 2 screens, such as is the case now for most monitors, in the sense that they'll nicely display _half_ of an 8.5*11-inch page. or it can be 2-to-1, where two printed pages equal 1 screen, such as is the case right now for most monitors, in the sense that they'll nicely display a 2-page spread of a 5*8 novel. and it _could_ be 1-to-1, too, as is the case now if we take our monitors and turn them from landscape to portrait, where they will display an 8.5*11-inch pagesize quite nicely. (go ahead and place a piece of paper up against your monitor right now, you'll see what i mean.) oh yeah, please don't some yahoo pipe up and say "but we can't expect that every screen will be the size of our desktop monitors". _of_course_ there will be a wide variety of screen-sizes, but the notion that a major-ratio congruence will be useful _still_ has the same credence and weight. one of the main reasons people resonate to .pdf is that the congruence between screen and paper makes them comfortable. they see equivalence. making the equivalence as transparent as possible is a powerful step to ease people toward e-books. and further, once we have "clipboard computers" -- a p.c. with the form-factor of a clipboard, with wireless web-access from anywhere -- there'll be mass movement to that screensize, exactly because it maps 1-to-1 on 8.5*11 paper. -bowerbird