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Comment by oDot | Hacker News Reader

What bugs me with some books is that they have excellent content but are written redundantly. This leaves me reading 300 pages instead of 120.

Why can't this:

> We cannot talk to the designer, so we rely upon whatever information is available to us: what the device looks like, what we know from using similar things in the past, what was told to us in the sales literature, by salespeople and advertisements, by articles we may have read, by the product website and instruction manuals.

be written like that:

> Unable to contact the designer, we rely on preexisting information from sales material, salespeople, ads, articles or the device appearance.

or even:

> Unable to contact the designer, we rely on preexisting information.

Not every book should feel like Harry Potter, no matter how great the content.

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So, a dirty secret in the publishing industry is that publishers often make book deals based on the number of words you write, not how effective and quickly you can convey your ideas.

This results in them rather taking a 300 page book vs 100 page book because they sell the 300 page book for more than the 100 page book and thus make more profit.

I personally have a friend who has authored many big name publisher books and he is always telling me how many words he has to have done by X date. The emphasis is on how many words, like 60,000 words.

Even though he can write a book that says the same shit in 20,000 words, the book publishers don't want this, because they won't make as much money.

That really sucks for the tech industry, maybe for fiction it is fine, since people just want more time outside reality anyways, but when you are trying to gain knowledge, a 300 page book is not usually as good as a 100 page book.

:sigh:

Our company was contacted by a few publishers about writing a book on our industry, but they all wanted ridiculous page counts that were impossible to fill (with anything that most people could actually read and understand anyway).

I get the marketing/value angle but it prevents lot of good material that would otherwise be written or written well.

This is a huge reason I preferred to self-publish. I have a math book that is 12-chapters (~90 pages total), written in a compact, friendly style I prefer. There are too many incentives to pad out your writing when you are trying to fill physical shelf space ("look impressive" vs "be useful"). Instead of a page count, how about an idea count?

(I get the occasional feedback that people wish that the book was longer, they want more topics, but never any individual chapter being longer...)

What book? I'm on the lookout for a good math book.

Kalid has a whole pile of good stuff at:

https://betterexplained.com/

Thanks Jacques :)

Math, Better Explained

https://www.amazon.com/Math-Better-Explained-Unlock-Intuitio...

Check out a few articles on https://betterexplained.com/cheatsheet and see if they fit your style.

Oh Kalid it's you! I haven't bought your book (and I'll remediate to that right now), but I've followed all your posts, they're fantastic.

Go buy this guy's book :)

Thanks Jerome =).

Thanks!

Just to throw in a plug:

'The Pleasures of Counting' is one of the best math books you can get your hands on.

It's harder to tell how long an ebook is than a paper book and harder to know where you are in it from the feeling of how many pages are gripped in each hand. This is a downside of ebooks for me--harder to get an automatic sense of the geography of the book, where I am in it, where interesting things I read were located, where to flip to in order to check something.

But I think there's a silver lining to the length being so hard to see. I suspect it will lead to more authors tailoring their book length to how best to express the content rather than to the market expectations of the physical size of a "book".

Yep, exactly. I prefer print for books I intend to refer to often. (I use createspace to turn the ebook to print on demand. With Softcover & LaTeX, you can get print-quality PDFs, best of both worlds.)

Focusing on the ebook version first helps you keep the content to the right (best-fitting) length.

Well if I have a choice in book selection, I usually do a few quick skims trough some random parts to see which ones explain things best. So overly verbose books would get less preference here.

This is especially true when you are reading management books. I always look for some papers from the author on the same topic and substitute them for the books. I wish there is world out there that can reward short form books both fiction and non fiction.

Succinctness is important and I think your middle example is actually a much better sentence than the original, while retaining the same information (even if it should say "the device's appearance" or "the appearance of the device".

However, I think length is not the key to how long a book takes to read. There are 600 page books I could read in a week. There are 100 page books that take weeks to read.

There are books that are too dense: Sometimes a slightly rambling, digressive style can give the mind space in which to reflect. If every sentence hits us with another dense thought, our mind tires quickly.

Also consider this: writing succinctly is hard work. Perhaps the author didn't have time to work on making every thought pithy and still expressive.

Some of us are slow readers, and just reading the raw amount of words is a limitation, even before we get into how difficult it is to understand.

Exactly. Writing well isn't about listing facts. It's an art. That's not to say works can't be overwrought. Buts it's also not to say that long needs to be short.

right, writing's about the useful order of the facts.

Sure, some books are too dense. But honestly, I've only met such in mathematics and theoretical physics.

I've bumped into books (and other writing) where there's simply far too much chewing to get to a bloody point. Every passage has some lengthy aside about irrelevent matters. Often personal bit. The late 1990s / early 2000s highly padded tech texts were the worst for this. Que is an imprint that comes to mind, and many of the "24 hours" type books. O'Reilly and No Starch were usually (though not always) better. The old AT&T Unix classics are the opposite: concise, clear, and highly useful.

Vendor docs are often the wworst -- simply repeating descriptions already apparent from interfaces or systems whilst providing no insight whatsoever to how the tool is used as a system.

The problems this causes are at least threefold:

1. The documentation is ineffective. It doesn't convey useful information.

2. If you're trying to find useful passages, yo've got to chew through far too much crud.

3. The books are huge and heavy. Carrying one means foregoing two or three other (useful) books. And they simply weigh too damned much.

I suspect crowding out other books for shelf space was part of the strategy.

Many interesting arguments can not be distilled into simple factual statements. Interesting arguments are often complex and nuanced. We write about them to share our thoughts on them with others. Language is a very lossy medium for transmitting thoughts, so we need to include lots of seemingly redundant information. The more details we include, the more of our original thoughts we can confer. Some of the things we spell out might be implied by previous statements; but the more we spell them out, the more we can assure that the reader is making the same associations. Redundant details are a sort of code to protect the integrity of the message.

Would you have been able to distill the information down like that without reading the more thorough/verbose versions first? If you come back to the reduced sentence in 6 months will you find yourself wondering where the pre-existing information comes from?

I have actually opened to book on a random page I don't remember reading, then looked for a relevant sentence.

You're right about excluding information (as in my third example), but my second example has practically all of it and is still much shorter

For non-fiction, I give everything a 15 minute skim to get the Very Big Points. Only then do I decide on if the details are worth chasing. (Usually it's if I need more convincing, or explaining) In many cases (example: Gladwell) 15 minutes is enough, and you can get through 15-20 High Concept books in the time that this author suggests that you read one.

This is a big change for me - I used to give every author the benefit of the doubt, and drove to finish everything I picked up. Then I ran out of time.

The first example is a lot more clear; providing specific examples to illustrate a general point is quite often useful.

As an aside, I really hope that future iterations of Google's SEO algorithm catch this. Right now it is too heavily weighted towards word count and keyword usage. People who write for SEO are rewarded for redundancy. There should really be a succinctness score. dibs.

I agree. Not trying to be racist, but I find that British authors are quite often unnecessarily verbose, so I'm somewhat gun shy when picking up their books.

One notable exception to this observation is Douglas Self, who writes thick, incredibly useful, highly detailed, and remarkably entertaining books on audio circuitry design. They read almost like good novels.

>One notable exception to this observation is Douglas Self, who writes thick, incredibly useful, highly detailed, and remarkably entertaining books on audio circuitry design. They read almost like good novels.

Maybe because sometimes you really need those highly detailed, long, and intricate arguments to fully understand all the nuances of the subject.

"British" isn't a race... just saying.

Spot on! As someone once said, most books should have been blogs, while most blogs tweets.

I'm with you 100%, and most of the time I'm very terse. After losing power a few times, my first digital answering machine message iterated down to "message."

It's stopped me from writing in the past, because I don't have the quantity. Nice to know someone might appreciate that fact.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001229

Rework is the perfect example of doing this right. After writing the book authors went through it and made it 1/3 shorter.

Result is extremely succint and almost every sentence is valuable and insightful.

I seem to only notice this when I read recent books. I suspect only reading old books gives you a filter that gets rid of that kind of thing.

The worst habit is when writers just start listing examples of stuff, beyond what is required to make their overall point, as if by adding lots of unnecessary evidence will make their point stronger.

Positive bias, what you expect to be right are used as arguments in favor of your idea (I'm not against you, it's just an argument for how some things are written for a particular objective group).

I read sometime ago how you have to explain several times in several forms the same thing to make it obvious to the reader.

While more concise and exact for example you can convey a lot of information in a very short space using math, but this relies on previous exposure to notation and practice with it.

A book that once you understand is beautiful and powerful and concise it's the compilers red dragon book, which uses math notation and procedural description to cover some topics.

https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Alfre...

It's also my main problem with many otherwise great non-fiction books. First, it takes more time. Second, when I don't learn new things my thoughts start to wander, and I get very far from the reading flow state. Third, I have a feeling that either the author think that I am dumb so (s)he needs to repeat things, or it is hastily written (for me, an admirer of the Paul Graham's concise style, reducing text takes much, much more time than just writing it... and it's totally worth it).

Because it contains less information. Maybe you can do 80% as good with 30% the length. But to go 100% you need to go into details that are lost by writing so succinctly. So if your purpose is to do a general overview, then yes, this approach is okay. If not, it's better to be more verbose than strictly needed rather than omit information for the sake of shortness.

The worst example of this that I've met to date is Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander's Surfaces and Essences. It conveys such an important message but it repeats itself so often that the eyes start glazing over.

> Not every book should feel like Harry Potter, no matter how great the content.

Nobody is going to pay $29.95 for a pamphlet.

This is true, but if the information density is high enough, people might.

I will even pay extra for software that removes the padding :P

I have seen that price for research papers with single digit page count.

And nobody pays it.

Just like in school, authors sometimes have length requirements that make it necessary to pad their writing.

And not everyone learns in the same manner, sometimes repetition is necessary for people.

Your first example is exactly what I skip when reading a book..

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