Prediction: number of pages in books 6 and 7

[nkafkafi]

No: HPFGUIDX 91902

Checking my US editions, these are the number of pages in each of the 
books:

SS: 309 pages
CoS: 341 pages
PoA: 435 pages
GoF: 734 pages
OotP: 870 pages

Simple linear extrapolation yields:

Book 6: 993 pages
Book 7: 1144 pages

I've already started weights training 8-)

Actually, the picture is even worse than the numbers above indicate. 
I did not take into account that Scholastic used a smaller font in 
OotP, so they managed to squeeze more lines per page and more words 
per line. In order to get the true picture, I used my electronic 
versions of the books to check the number of words in each book, 
divided by the number of words in OotP and multiplied by OotP number 
of pages. This way we get for each book the OotP-adjusted number of 
pages (kind of like having prices from 50 years ago inflation-
adjusted): 

SS: 254 pages
CoS: 286 pages
PoA: 361 pages
GoF: 640 pages
OotP: 870 pages

OotP really stands out this way. No wonder it took so much time to 
write. It is nearly as big as books 1, 2 and 3 put together! In fact, 
if you plot these numbers they look more like exponential growth, so 
linear extrapolation is just not up to it anymore, and we need to 
take some stronger measures. If I extrapolate with a third-degree 
polynomial I get this prediction (assuming Scholastic keep using the 
OotP font):

Book 6: 1132 pages
Book 7: 1339 pages

I really hope JKR will break this trend, or it will be ages before we 
get to read these books.

Neri