Personally speaking, I find the lack of relationship between manuscript "pages" and published pages a more solvable problem than it ever has been historically.

Personally speaking, I find the lack of relationship between manuscript "pages" and published pages a more solvable problem than it ever has been historically. WYSIWYG visual editors for different ebook and print formats and page dimensions would at least give a working approximation for those who wish to self publish and exercise some degree of QC over the eventual reading experience. My wild theory is that the reading experience, or RX if you will permit my being cute, is going to become An Official Thing in the ebook era, especially as authors play with the different narrative structures theoretically unleashed by the medium. Totally agree with your comment about the scene as the atomic unit of the novel, however. Or at least the molecular unit, if you consider the beat to be the atom.