Data › Typefaces

How the typeface changes a book’s page count

By Lukas · version 1, measured 3 November 2026

Set by Kernsetzer at a true 11 pt on 6 × 9 in, the whole of Pride and Prejudice runs to 344 pages in EB Garamond and 430 in Literata: a quarter more, and $1.03 more per copy at KDP. At 5 × 8 in the gap is 125 pages. Most of it is how big each typeface really is at “11 pt”: sized to look alike, as Kernsetzer sets them, the five typefaces come within 20 pages of each other at 6 × 9 in. All the figures are below and as CSV and JSON.

5 × 8 in

5.5 × 8.5 in

6 × 9 in

12 × 19 cm

13.5 × 21.5 cm

A5

What it costs at KDP, 6 × 9 in, black ink

Two kinds of 11 pt

A point size measures the body a typeface is cut on, not the letters you see. Some typefaces fill that body with big lowercase letters, others leave room around small ones, so “11 pt” looks larger in Literata than in EB Garamond. A word processor sets exactly the size you type, which is the “true 11 pt” in these tables. Kernsetzer evens that out: its 11 pt sets each typeface at the size where its lowercase letters are about as tall as Libertinus Serif’s at 11, so EB Garamond comes out at 11.77 pt and Literata at 9.9. That is why its columns lie much closer together.

How it was measured

The book is the whole of Pride and Prejudice, 61 chapters and 113,644 words as Kernsetzer counts them, in R. W. Chapman’s text from Project Gutenberg (eBook #42671). Kernsetzer’s renderer, kernsetzer render in its build of 3 November 2026, set it in the Classic theme with the theme’s margins, line spacing and hyphenation, in each of the five text typefaces the app ships, at three of KDP’s trims and three of BoD’s. The line spacing grows with the type size, as it does in the theme. The page counts run from the first chapter to the last page; the title pages a finished book adds come on top, the same in every typeface.

The printing cost is KDP’s for black ink on white paper and a regular trim: $1.00 plus 1.2 cents a page on Amazon.com, €0.75 plus 1.2 cents on Amazon.de, as the KDP calculator has them (checked 26 October 2026). The script that set the book, tools/measure-typefaces.py, and the one that made this page are in the site’s repository, so the measurement can be repeated.

What the figures don’t cover

This is one novel, with a lot of dialogue and long paragraphs between. A book of other proportions changes the totals, though the gaps between the typefaces stay of the same kind. The margins and the line spacing are the Classic theme’s; wider margins or looser lines add pages in every typeface alike. And the typefaces differ in more than their size: how a page looks is a choice this data can’t make for you.

Four of the 114 renders failed, on a bug in the line breaker of Typst 0.15.1, the typesetting engine inside Kernsetzer. Their cells show a dash, and the files leave them empty, until the next version fills them.

The files

One row per trim, typeface and size, 120 rows: typefaces.csv and typefaces.json. The columns are trim, typeface, size_setting (10, 11, 12 as Kernsetzer sizes them, true11), actual_pt (the size set), words, pages, kdp_cost_usd and kdp_cost_eur.

License: CC BY 4.0: name Kernsetzer and link this page. Cite as: Kernsetzer, “Typeface, type size and page count”, version 1, measured 3 November 2026, https://kernsetzer.app/data/typefaces.

How many words fit on a page at each trim and size is in the words-per-page data, and the page count calculator turns it into a page count for your own book. If you use these figures somewhere, I’d like to hear about it.