How long a piece can be, and how fast it stays

A piece in Inkbreaker is not a note. It will hold a book.

The short answer

You can keep a 200,000 word manuscript in one piece and go on writing in the middle of it. You do not have to chop a novel into little files to keep the app happy, and you will not be punished for keeping it whole.

If you would rather work chapter by chapter, you can do that too, and folders will hold the chapters the way a binder does. Both are good ways to work. The point is that the choice is yours to make for your own reasons, and not something the software forces on you.

The numbers

We would rather show our work than tell you it is fast.

We test the editor against manuscripts of a known size and measure how much work a single keystroke costs it, with the cursor parked in the middle of the document, which is the hardest place for it to be.

Manuscript	Work per keystroke
A short story	about 0.7 milliseconds
A 100,000 word novel	about 1.7 milliseconds
A 200,000 word novel	about 2.2 milliseconds

A screen redraws about once every 16 milliseconds. So even in a 200,000 word manuscript, a keystroke costs a small fraction of a single frame, and across a hundred keystrokes in a row the editor drops none of them.

The shape matters more than any one figure: a book fifty times longer than a short story asks about three times as much per key, not fifty times. The cost of typing does not grow with your book the way you might expect it to.

Saving a book

A save sends the paragraphs you changed, not the whole book.

Every paragraph you write carries a quiet identity of its own, so when you stop typing we can work out which paragraphs actually moved and send only those. Changing a sentence in the middle of chapter twenty of a 200,000 word manuscript used to mean sending all 200,000 words back to us. It now sends about a thousandth of that.

Your book is saved just as often and just as completely. There is simply far less of it going up the wire, which matters most on a phone, on a train, on a signal you are already fighting for.

The rebuilt copy is checked before it is kept. Your browser tells us what it expects the finished document to look like, and if what we put back together does not match that exactly, we throw it away and take the whole book instead. That costs a moment. It cannot cost a word.

What the numbers do not say

They are measured on a reasonably modern laptop, on a production build, in a single browser tab. An older machine will be slower, and a browser with thirty other tabs open is doing thirty other things.

They also describe typing, which is what you spend your time doing. Opening a very long manuscript takes a moment longer than opening a short one, because the whole book has to be drawn before you can write in it.

If you are working on something very long and it does not feel right to you, please tell us. That is exactly the case we want to hear about, and it is the case we keep testing against.

Should you split a book into chapters?

Split it if it helps you, not to help the software.

Reasons that are actually about your writing:

• You want to reorder chapters by dragging them around.
• You want to publish chapter by chapter as you go.
• You want a word target per chapter rather than for the whole book.
• You want to hand one chapter to a beta reader without handing over the manuscript.

Reasons that are not:

• Worrying that the editor cannot cope. It can.

Folders keep the pieces of a book in order, and Book Studio will assemble them back into one manuscript for export whenever you want it whole again.