PDFSIZE

Here’s what I can piece together from the data. There’s no single authoritative study of “average pages per PDF on .edu domains,” but we can build a solid estimate by triangulating several sources.

What we know Academic research papers (the most-studied PDF category):

Median 4,133 words (~10–12 pages single-spaced) from a study of 61,519 PubMed Central papers Central 90% range: 2,023–8,284 words (~5–20 pages) General PDF corpus (all web PDFs):

The SafeDocs/Common Crawl corpus has ~8 million PDFs but page-count distributions aren’t published PDF Candy’s analysis found a median size of ~9.6 MB and mean of ~70.4 MB across web PDFs — the extreme skew tells us there’s a long tail of large scanned documents pulling the mean up Estimating .edu specifically University PDFs break into distinct buckets with very different page counts:

Document Type Est. Pages Share of .edu PDFs Syllabi 3–8 ~15% Lecture slides (exported) 15–40 ~20% Research papers / preprints 8–15 ~25% Textbook chapters / course readers 15–40 ~15% Administrative forms / policies 1–5 ~15% Theses & dissertations 80–300 ~5% Reports, manuals, catalogs 20–100 ~5% My estimate for .edu PDFs: median ~12 pages, mean ~20–25 pages. The median is pulled down by all the short syllabi and forms. The mean gets dragged up by theses and long course readers.

What this means for pricing At your 0.20 – 0.20–0.30/page pricing:

Scenario Pages Cost at $0.20 Cost at $0.30 Median .edu PDF 12 $2.40 $3.60 Mean .edu PDF 22 $4.40 $6.60 Typical course reader 30 $6.00 $9.00 Thesis / dissertation 150 $30.00 $45.00

5minimum∗∗yousetforpay−as−you−gomakessense—itcoversStripefeesandcatchesmostoftheshortdocuments(syllabi,forms).Themedian.eduPDFwouldcomeinjustunderthe5 minimum at pay-as-you-go rate, meaning most casual conversions hit the floor price anyway.

For a department converting their backlog, the Department tier at $0.225/page on a typical 1,000-page semester would be ~45–80 documents.

Sources:

Research Paper Length – Data from 61,519 Examples Average PDF Sizes by Use Case – PDF Candy SafeDocs PDF Corpus – Digital Corpora PDF in the Wild 2024 – PDF Association