How Big A Book? Estimating the Total Surface Area of the Book of Mormon Plates

Last year I wrote up a brief piece responding to my former branch president who left the Church on the topic of how many plates composed Mormon's abridgement, revealing his embarrassingly bad mathematical skills:

How many metal plates composed Mormon's Abridgement? Answering a Criticism

The Interpreter Foundation just posted a new article on this issue

Bruce E. Dale, How Big A Book? Estimating the Total Surface Area of the Book of Mormon Plates (.pdf)

Here is the conclusion:

The total surface area required to engrave the characters in which the Book of Mormon is written on the plates is unknown. However, we do have a considerable amount of eyewitness testimony as to the dimensions and weight of the plates. We also have a modern language, Arabic, which is likely similar to the language in which the Book of Mormon plates were written. We know approximately how much surface area was required to write the Qu’ran, using very small Arabic characters. Based on this and other information, several questions can be asked: 1) Can we estimate the surface area required to engrave the Book of Mormon? 2) Can we check that estimate using an independent method of calculation? 3) Do these two estimates give physically reasonable results?

Two separate and completely independent calculation approaches were taken to address the question of the surface area of the Book of Mormon plates. The results of the calculations are between about 30 and 86 square feet, a difference of less than three-fold. The average of these two values is about 60 square feet, meaning the Book of Mormon was engraved on about 40 individual plates. This is roughly 15 percent of the surface area of the text of the Book of Mormon in our modern English translation. Thus the two independent calculation approaches give consistent and reasonable values. They also support the idea that the Book of Mormon authors achieved great economy of space in writing the Book of Mormon.