Reading a novel of 953 pages on an e-ink tablet: what actually matters
A long novel is where the small decisions in a file stop being cosmetic. At 953 pages you will open the book a few hundred times, and anything that costs you two seconds each time costs you an hour of the reading. The things that matter are not the ones listings talk about. They are the length of a line, the size of the type, whether the contents can be reached without paging back to the front, and whether the page is the shape of your screen at all. Cheap PDFs of public domain novels usually get the last one wrong, which is why the type arrives small and shy of the edges. This note goes through each of those in turn using a book we set, says what we measured, and ends with the thing most sellers of public domain texts leave out.
The line, the type and the page
Our classics are set on a 157 by 210 millimetre page, the 3:4 shape of a 10.3 inch e-ink display, so the page fills the screen rather than sitting in the middle of it with bands at the sides.
On that page the text is ARLing Serif at 13 points on an 18 point line, 22 lines of text to a page, with no hyphenation, which works out at an average of 64 characters a line. Line length is the quiet one of those numbers. A line of about that width is what lets the eye find the start of the next line without hunting, and a file that reaches it by shrinking an A4 layout onto your screen will not.
Nothing in the file is below 10 points, the fonts are embedded as complete outlines rather than as bitmap substitutes, and a diagram is always kept whole on one page.
Getting back to the contents
A book you cannot navigate is a scroll. Every page of ours carries a Contents link in an 8 millimetre footer beside the page number, with a row 7.5 millimetres tall so a finger can hit it, and the contents itself links to every chapter and part, each entry 8.8 millimetres tall with long titles wrapped onto two lines.
Measured in the finished file, Ben-Hur has 1043 internal links and 91 link targets, with 0 dead links and 0 pages overflowing, across 8 books and 81 chapters. The other title is longer and is issued as five volumes following the five parts of the source: 479, 523, 504, 414 and 367 pages, 2287 in all, 117 chapters, 2415 links and 133 targets, 0 dead.
The band for the pen
A tablet with a pen invites writing in a book, and a novel with no room for it wastes the pen. At the foot of every page there is a 33 millimetre band for notes with a dotted rule, under the text and above the footer.
Since the band is only useful if you can also type into it on a computer, there is one form field over it on every text page: 935 in Ben-Hur and 2257 across the five volumes, one per text page.
What we could not test
No file of ours has been opened on a physical reMarkable, Kindle Scribe, Boox or Supernote, so everything above is measured in the PDF and not on glass. Greek words in one of the titles are set in a fallback system font, which is a limitation of the typesetting rather than of the text.
The samples exist for exactly this reason: the first three chapters of Ben-Hur are 26 pages with 31 links and 21 fields, and the first three chapters of the other title are 52 pages with 57 links and 47 fields.
The part sellers leave out
The same texts are offered free of charge as EPUB by Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks. If you read on a phone or a reader that is happy with EPUB, that is very likely the right answer, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it afterwards.
What is paid for in a file like ours is the typesetting for an e-ink page, the band for notes, the page numbers and the linked contents in a PDF, and our own listing says so in its own words. The text itself is public domain and unchanged.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the novel split into five volumes?
Because the source itself is in five parts, and the volumes follow them: 479, 523, 504, 414 and 367 pages, 2287 in all. Each volume has its own title page, edition page and contents.
Is the text abridged or modernised?
No. It is a public domain text from a plain text transcription, set without changes; the page sizes and the links are ours, the words are not.
Will it print?
Each title also comes as A4 and US Letter files that carry the same 139 by 194 millimetre block centred on the sheet, so the pages, numbers and links are identical in all three files.
Where to look next
The two titles are The Count of Monte Cristo and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, both public domain, both set on the same page, at 4.90 € a title in our Etsy shop, https://www.etsy.com/shop/ARLingPuzzles. Free samples of the first three chapters are part of each listing. If you would rather have something to solve than to read, the ten printable puzzle books hold 100 puzzles each with solutions at 4.90 € a book.
Sources. The facts in this note are numbered after our internal fact list and were checked on the publication date. If a source has changed since, write to support@arling.sk and we will correct this page.
- F134: ARLing, own check (checked 17 September 2026)
- F143: ARLing Puzzle books, product information: https://arling.sk/puzzle-books/ (checked 17 September 2026)
- F164: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo (checked 17 September 2026)
- F171: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/alexandre-dumas/the-count-of-monte-cristo/chapman-and-hall