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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I don't think fiction can be shrunk down, but I think lots of non-fiction books can.

I'm thinking specifically of some books that I've read in the past couple of years that include:

  * Deep Work
  * Influence
  * Thinking Fast and Slow
  * Predictably Irrational
  * Getting Things Done
  * How to Win Friends and Influence People

I think all of these books suffer from the common pattern of present an idea then a bunch of examples that demonstrate the idea. I don't think you lose anything by ditching the examples. The core ideas are usually well stated and don't need clarification or demonstration.

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That depends on how easy it's for you to learn and internalise a new idea.

You can understand the basic premise of these books by just reading the summary, but you need a lot of reinforcement to internalise the idea and want to execute on it. That's just how learning works.

What I find about general-interest nonfiction is not that it's longer than it needs to be to make its point, but that its point is often shallow or even wrong. Take Freakonomics. I thought it was a great read, but on reflection I think "there's a hidden economic reason for everything" is not a particularly useful observation. Indeed, it might be better stated that "there's no realm of human behavior that economists won't study." Or to take an older example, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. Published in 1999. Or The Great Depression of 1990, published in 1985. Or consider pretty much any book of diet advice. If it was published more than 15 years ago, it's very unlikely to agree with our current understanding of healthy diet. If it was published less than 15 years ago, we haven't debunked it yet.

I agree completely about non-fiction books.

There are certainly some fiction books that could use some shrinking down (For Exhibit A: Crossroads of Twilight -- book 10 of the Wheel of Time)

I’m surprised you made it that far! I stopped reading after (I think it was) book 4 when I realized it could be summarized as “the company travels a few miles down a river for 800 pages”.

Now that you mention it, when I was reading Snow Crash I started skipping all the parts about ancient Sumerian language. All that he needed to do was establish that it worked as some kind of low-level system of the brain that could be tinkered with. Instead it felt like he spent 4 months researching ancient Sumer and by God he was going to not let that work go to waste.

I believe Amazon found people tend to leave a non fiction book 100 pages from the end, so commissioned books 100 pages shorter than usual. A lot of it is about the books looking good and justifying its own price on the bookstore shelf.

It is nice when the spline is wide enough to have the title of the book on it in a decently big font. Probably a 3/4 inch book would working in most cases. I think many books are padded to reach a certain thickness. For non-fiction the publishers should just use thicker pages or put a bunch of blank pages at the back. Or just print the whole book over again.

Agreed in principle, and clearly there's no binary rule as every book will have its own level of "padding" / laboring the point, but I think the (O)OPs comment about "internalizing" is interesting, and personally I don't think a "tl;dr" of the books above wouldn't have had the same effect on me.

I agree that there's no binary rule. I read Sapiens and while it was a very long book, I don't think it could have been shorter.

BTW, laboring the point is precisely the phrase I was looking for but couldn't recall.

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