Is a ream of paper 500 or 480 sheets?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
01 September 2013
Josphat Wainaina
proclaims from the outset that he is too old for all the “digital this
and analogue that brouhaha”. Then he continues to write: “When I was in
school we used foolscaps to write notes but somewhere along the way they
were replaced by A4 papers. By the way, I am old enough to remember the
time when Harun Mwau challenged the election of Daniel Moi on the basis
that he had not presented the list of one million supporters in a
foolscap size paper – he had used A4.
“Apart from that, I
also remember that back then, a ream of paper used to have 480 sheets
but nowadays it has 500. I can understand 500 is a nice round number but
can you figure out the ‘analogue’ reason for 480?”
Yes Josphat, I think
there is a good reason for it. If you take a large piece of paper and
fold it once, you get two halves. A second fold gives four quarters and
a third yields 8 eighths. If you try to fold farther than that, you will
find it very difficult to do.
I suspect that this
is how they used to mark the cutting lines on paper in the old days.
Each large sheet from the factory would easily make eight smaller ones
without the need for accurate measurements.
Thus three large
sheets would produce 24 sheets, which was known as a quire of paper. 20
quires made a ream and 20 x 24 = 480 sheets. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
But that’s not all…
In March 2011, I
wrote an article in this column explaining the reason behind the
seemingly awkward measurements of the A4-size paper; the 210mm by 297mm.
In it I noted that the sizes begin from A0; the first fold yields A1,
the second A2 and so on up to the fourth which gives us the A4.
Clearly, from one A0
sheet, we get 16 A4s. Thus if we start with 30 sheets of A0, we shall
get 480 A4s. In my view, this should be the standard ream. But since
people have always assumed that a ream is 500 sheets, manufacturers have
been forced to add an extra 20 sheets to the package.
While that doesn’t
appear like a major problem (after all, what’s 20 sheets between
friends?), it does make the job of packing the reams a lot more
cumbersome. Making a 480-sheet ream is much easier than producing a
500-sheet one. For the 480, the manufacturer only counts 30 pieces of A0
and then cuts them to A4. No more counting is required.
For the 500 sheets, a
second count must be done to add the extra 20 sheets…and maybe even a
third one to confirm that there are indeed 500 pieces. The extra
counting comes at additional cost so paper manufacturers are not usually
very happy about the turn of events. But that’s the way the world is:
one should never fight change!
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