Bestselling books have been getting shorter | Hacker News Reader

Bestselling books have been getting shorter

wordsrated.com

87 pointsbenbreen114 comments

IMO most popular non-fiction books don't have enough content to justify their length.

I'm not saying that the content is bad, or you shouldn't buy the book. The book is just padded out so you feel better about buying it. Who would buy a 40-page book for $15? The book gets padded out to 200 pages by repeating itself, adding filler sections, anecdotes, graphic design choices, etc.

I am happy to see books get shorter if it means that they have less filler.

That's something I have noticed with a lot of programming books. They are super long and are just pages of unfocused blablabla and screenshots. I miss books like K&R that are well written and concise.

Problem is that padding most non-fiction books is really easy while padding a fiction book is hard. So expect non-fiction to get longer and fiction to get shorter.

I've heard that if you write a technical book on programming and work with a publisher, they'll encourage you to stick code listings in your book.

Actually, as a writer of two fiction books: it's really easy. You just include more pointless description.

Some popular fiction writer (James Patterson? not sure) said, paraphrasing, "You know all those parts you tend to skip over? I just don't write those."

He doesn't write those, but he works with a team of writers to deliver books at the cadence he does, so probably he meant someone else writes those.

I don't think so. I think he meant "that doesn't appear in my books." I'm sure he reads them over critically before sending them off.

anyhow, I'm not even sure he's the one who said that.

Brandon Sanderson wrote about his process of writing Mistborn and putting it through focus groups.

There were apparently several rounds of female readers complaining that he wasn't doing enough description of ballgowns.

My nightmare as a male writer :)

Fortunately I had a female editor who read over stuff like that with a critical eye. And no ball gowns in my books. I do have a wedding but I don't even mention what the bride was wearing. My bad.

A friend in the book business once told me that publishers like big thick programming books because they take up space on bookstore shelves and deny that space to rival books!

I suspect K&R may have been written initially as an internal reference (for AT&T).

Though it also pre-dated the era of mass-market computer books, say, 1995--2010 or so.

Many books are padded by:

1. using thicker paper

2. using a larger font

4. more spaces between lines

5. larger margins

6. a bunch of blank and/or pointless pages at the beginning

7. ad pages at the end

I see it all the time. A book's contents can vary 2:1 in length compared to another one of the same physical size.

Which is longer: a game of thrones #1 or Harry Potter #6... I think they're similar page lengths but got is probably at least 2x the words. Kindle sections or word count really do make more sense for pure length. But thickness and heft are real as well as is paper cost :).

I have the above analogy from teaching my kids not to be afraid of long books. It actually works both ways. "Look you finished hp6 when you were 12, got is like the same size don't be afraid."

I've never read Harry Potter #6, but AGOT#1 has more words than The Two Towers, and The Return of the King put together.

Each of AGOT #3 and #5 on their own have almost has as many words as the entire LOTR trilogy. And while there are a lot of memes about how half of those words are detailed descriptions[1] of incredibly elaborate meals, I wouldn't say that they detract from the story.

[1] Onion grease dribbling down double-chins as wedding guests are gorging themselves on large pies, wide as wagon wheels, stuffed almost to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, mushrooms, and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savory brown gravy.

if you look at the books themselves they're the same size but yes that was my point agot #1 is so so long. dude wrote so many words they made him split #4 into 2 books so the could make a paperback version.

293,000¹ vs 184,000², so about 1.6 times the word count.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#Publish...

² https://www.anycount.com/word-count-of-books/harry-potter-wo...

There's a great book by Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke, where an author of a well-received book decides to be his own publisher for his second book.

It's not long enough, so he does almost all those things you mention. It doesn't end well for him.

This going to sound silly but I hated reading the Pragmatic Programmer series of books because of the font and the size.

And listicles!!! ;-)

Indeed, many non-fiction books seem to be really solid long form essays that were inflated with needless filler content to 100 pages. (Note I'm saying 'many' not 'all').

One thing to keep in mind is that for traditional publishers your book's spine needs to be thick enough to be visible on the shelf and not get lost between other books.

Good point. This made me appreciate how shops would also stack books in the "perpendicular" direction with the front cover being visible.

It’s amusing that people pay for page count and not the outcome. With travel, you pay more for faster shipping. Why not for transporting a good idea into your head?

Hmm, now that's interesting. I wonder what is the most someone would pay for a single sentence assuming it gives you the required information.

Executive summaries are part of the industry, where people boil down non-fiction books into short pieces of text. E.g. Blinkist (not affiliated, just the first result on Google)

It is somewhat funny that presumably a good amount of work goes into padding the book, and then work goes in on the other side to strip the padding away.

I don't know anyone who looks specifically at the page count over hype/reviews, but books are a physical media and people kinda have an idea of what a book should look like & cost. If we're really talking about 40 pp vs 200 pp., a hardbound 40 page book would look as silly on a shelf as you would reading it on the beach. Something that could be described as a pamphlet doesn't seem worth $15. Finding that tipping point of where a book looks like a book and also gets great reviews could be important.

People like content. More content is correlated with longer page counts. Longer page counts are correlated with higher retail prices. Someone said "I want to make more money" and the result was a set of incentives to pad out books with more pages of filler.

Consumers have no reliable way of telling how much actual content is in a book. They only know the page count.

Not so fast. I’d wager that repetitive padding is more effective at getting ideas into your brain for the same reason you don’t retain as much material from SparkNotes. There’s less exposure and time spent with the ideas in the shorter work.

As a teacher, I totally agree. Understanding something when the teacher presents material is not at all the same thing as digging in and trying some problems yourself.

Oh man, it's SUCH a problem with non-fiction. Books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work are great, but both feel like they could easily be about half as long.

Actually, since I'm sorta on the producer end of that market:

Word count is much more often what people in the biz focus on. It eliminates all the talk about margins, leading, font, paper thickness, etc.

Word-count is what authors are concerned with.

Spine-width is what (physical bookstore) sales are based on, amongst other non-content factors.

Publishers who focused on quality and salient content (say, back in the day, O'Reilly, Wiley (technical), and No Start Press, over, say, SAMS and whoever put out the "in 24 hours" series of books (notoriously overpadded) got a significant reputation boost in my eyes. (ORA lost quite a few points rushing some shoddy junk to market, but their classic work was and remains excellent.)

If you are correct, then the decrease in page length could just be the result of more people using ebooks, where the physical size of the book is of no consequence.

I've noticed an enormous number of business and self-help books are little more than checklists. Each chapter's title is essentially "Do X", and the contents give examples of when someone "did X" in a specific scenario. "X" is often very general advice, so the examples usually lack nuance or depth, resulting in a whole lot of fluff

Fantasy books are guilty as hell on this front.

I somewhat enjoyed The Wheel of Time, but the number of times the books had Nynaeve pulling her hair, or wearing a prettier dress than those made from stout two rivers wool - which she continued to maintain was just as good....

Sanderson seemed to cut that out (or at least back) after he took over the last three books.

If you think there is not enough information density in books, then books is the wrong format, use google/page hopping instead.

A book is more like a slow conversation/an opportunity to think about a topic.

I'm not sure why page count instead of word or character count is used - feels like there could easily be external factors such as page size or typeface that are effecting this.

That was my first thought. Maybe it’s not “books are getting shorter,” but “publishers are getting cheaper.” Decreasing margins, decreasing font size, etc could all explain a diminishing page count to save on printing costs.

That said, from looking into publishing, it seems like consensus is anything over 100k words (approx 400 pages) is basically unsellable unless you’re Stephen King or something. It’s not clear to me if this has always been the case.

Many of the longer novels in classic literature were originally serialized, and only later compiled into the lengthy tomes we know today.

Yep! Count of Monte Cristo is known as a long read but it was originally serialized. You can kinda tell too, the plot meanders a couple times. Nonetheless extremely entertaining, I'd highly recommend.

Same for Count of Monte Cristo and some of his other works. Also Don Quixote if I recall correctly. I actually read them one to two chapters a week to stay on a similar to original schedule.

I have wondered if the reading of Don Quixote serially was a very different experience from reading it as a novel. It was a serial satire, so I could see reading the "new episode" every week being funny. Before I got side-tracked, I was reading it like any other novel and, while any particular episode is set up comedically, Don Quixote's mostly harmless delusional actions being given exponentially more brutal responses I found increasingly depressing.

There’s a really great app called Serial Reader that breaks books in the public domain down into ~15 minute chunks and “delivers” the issue to you every day. The app is free (no ads, even!) but you can pay a small fee for a few extra features like scheduling the delivery days/time and being able to read ahead. I think it’s like $3 or maybe $5? I can’t recall. But I’m pretty sure it’s a one person operation. I have no affiliation with the app other than being a happy paying user.

Don Quixote was never a serial, it was published in full in a 4-parts volume (there is a second part that was written a decade later though).

Slightly related, but I'm a fan of web serialized fiction (fanfics, but also original works like Worm, Worth the Candle, Mother of Learning, Unsong, etc), and when I occasionally order paper copies I'm always astounded at just how physically large they are, in a way that doesn't come across in a purely digital format.

I should note that this rebuts the idea that long-form fiction is disappearing, it's just not getting physically published, because the internet remains the best way to distribute information (and often make a living, since patreon can often end up paying more than a publisher).

Btw, got any interesting book recommendations? (And yeah, I already know about r/rational ;))

Seems like we both got very similar book tastes. And to recepriociate, I think you might enjoy: - Pretty much everything by Ted Chiang, but especially Understand - Asimov's Nightfall - Greg Egan's Reasons to be happy

Pretty much all of Dickens and Zola.

Specifically, works published from roughly 1830 through the first quarter or half of the 20th century, driven by falling publication costs and rising literacy. Charles Dickens on particular developed the model, with The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836. Another notable work, the Sherlock Holmes series debuted in 1887 ("A Study in Scarlet").

Earlier novels (relatively few in number) tended to appear as their own works in whole form, so far as I'm aware. Though many may have been adaptations of other works --- sagas or legends (e.g., the Faust legend), plays, and other forms.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)>

Typical is 60-90k but 100k is pretty standard for SFF

It's the best proxy for retail space consumed.

Not just page size and typeface, how about those books with 100+ chapters, clearly just to increase the page count, as a new chapter ends the current page and the new chapter starts halfway down a new page. And don't get me started about those crazy large margins.

> We analyzed 3,444 titles that were ranked top3 on NYT weekly bestseller lists from 2011 to 2021

A little less than never.

Ok, we've narrowed the scope of the title above. Thanks!

I'm so weary of this sort of 'society is in decline' clickbait articles. Let's take some minimal amount of data, analyze it by some absurd criteria, and then present as some stunning insight.

There's so much wrong with this article that its hard to know where to start. The fuzziness of 'page count'. The absence of any consideration of digital readers and whether they even know the page count when starting a book.

Who ever said longer books are better than shorter books and how could they possibly justify that?

There's also trends that could easily account for this. Trilogies everywhere and one could argue that reading a trilogy is reading 1 large book vs 3 small books. Are graphic novels included?

It's all so silly

No one said longer books are better? Good writing is often concise. And the article doesn’t at all conclude “society is in decline”. You seem to be the only one making these leaps and drawing these conclusions.

"Good writing is often concise" is flawed logic when relating to long books, except for myopic planners.

Reminds me of this joke https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/x4427j/todays_writ...

You don't get it, and you won't until you learn to enjoy literature at scale, that is reading authors by their complete works.

I don’t think society is in decline but my best friend is a university teacher and if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world and increasingly good with images and videos as a medium of communication. The shift seems real.

Long works of literature were always fairly niche. If you read the articles you will see that bestsellers are going from short to shorter rather a decline in the publication of long novels.

> if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world

Do you mean they are less familiar with certain books (like famous ones like Ulysses) or their ability to learn from written medium has reduced (concentration levels, speed of reading, etc.)?

From my experience as a secondary school teacher, it's the latter which then leads to the former. Kids can't read. I'd say in my last year teaching I probably only had three kids who I would consider literate, able to read and make inferences, think about the material they're reading, etc. There's several reasons for this (and not just social media -- they're often taught to regurgitate for the state exams), but it's a real issue.

Traditionally many authors were paid by words/pages. I’d imagine revenue has a lot more to do with the number of books sold nowadays. This isn’t new specifically to the time range studied in this article, but many of the classic novels that come to mind were definitely influenced by an incentive (other than content) for a higher word count.

Tolstoy, for example, took advantage of being paid by the amount of content by basically saying everything twice in a different way. This style makes for relaxed reading, because you’ll catch the content the second time if not the first, but it’s obviously not necessary. Dickens, as another example, also published less-dense material on a regular basis based on his contractual obligations (his novels actually read better if you follow the original publication schedule). His books were just part of another publication, basically a newspaper. As long as he delivered a satisfactory amount of core-story each week, he kept his job. This incentivized him to split up the best parts and add some fluff.

I’m no less satisfied by a good modern book than War and Peace. I enjoy both for different reasons.

Is shorter worse? I recently checked out "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire", one of the volumes on the list in my little black book from back before Kiva Han became a Chase Manhattan branch, and was surprised how thin it is.

(I also begrudgingly reread Lolita and Animal Farm, both of which aren't exactly War and Peace in terms of page count... believe it or not, you can use "GRE words" outside the GRE when writing literature.)

Maybe folks should worry about whether their book will be read for generations instead of being payola'd into some airport lobby.

Must be a heavily abridged version. My full edition of RaFotRE is over 2000 pages in 3 volumes.

Are you sure you're not thinking of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"? That book is extremely long.

I haven't heard of the book "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" but it might be this one from 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25686327-the-rise-and-fa...

Can you post the ISBN? I suspect I got the wrong one, and Amazon owns goodreads.

(You'd be amazed the adventures you have at the library if you tell them you're doing a series of inter library loans because you're worried the Saudis owned your phone and Bezos can't be trusted.)

It is true that literary agents are less likely to take on a book that's "difficult" in any way, and "too long" is one of those ways. As slimy as they are, they do have a sense of what publishers want, who in turn have a sense of what readers want. And lots of people do not want to read books anymore, broadly speaking. There are too many other entertainment options.

I think fiction books that aren't extremely light reading are headed the way of classical music: a thing most people find too difficult to get into, and too dull until they've put in that effort, so it's coded as a "smart (and/or pretentious) people thing" and most folks just won't engage with it at all.

I think you're right, but it goes a step father. They then associate that with reading in general, and liking books. Then they start to believe that self-insert dystopian YA is just as literary as, say, actual dense literature that explores the human condition. Or they make books their personality, without ever reading them. r/books is full of examples like this, where it almost seems they talk more about the idea of reading than they do the books, while also constantly seeking validation for not even attempting something challenging.

There are a select few agents who specialize in literary fiction. If you start a naive search of literary agents, you will find that their stated interests zero in on books that are of the political moment. The majority of agents are looking for a book, preferably young adult fiction, that focuses on a protected class, of which the author should also be a member. This is not a complaint, but the evident regression to the mean, which is really no more than an acknowledgment of market forces, is available at a glance. Books are no longer commodities whose primary purpose is to be read. Rather, they are meant to capture an upswing of interest in a particular topic, and then become more widely celebrated than widely considered.

The fact is that most works of literary fiction written today are simply not up to snuff. Although there are writers devoted to their vocation, they lack a context in which to work. Literary agents cannot contribute to the process of writing. A kind of grassroots appreciation of the benefits intrinsic to reading and writing literature needs to take place, in my opinion, if we are to produce any great works of literature.

They have little codes that designate the genres they're interested in, like MG (middle grade) and YA (young adult). And of course, LBTQ etc.

> Books are no longer commodities whose primary purpose is to be read. Rather, they are meant to capture an upswing of interest in a particular topic, and then become more widely celebrated than widely considered.

Well said. A book to display on your coffee table, not necessarily to read.

A look at the Pulitzer Prize for fiction suggests to me that production has been uneven for a long time

Things being unfair in the past does not justify them being unfair in the future

I didn't have fairness in mind at all. I just think that we tend to remember the past for its successes and not for its mediocrities, so I hesitate to say that we are certainly at a low point.

Many things are competing for people's attention combined with people's ability to stay focused[1] going down may contribute to this.

This is probably to be expected as we take the discipline out of people.

[1] Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more.

I know a lot of teachers and have heard some pretty dire reports about trends in reading skills in students. Even the "advanced" kids are tripped up by sentences as complex as the sort that were common in juvenile literature of the postwar 20th century. This wasn't the case 15 years ago, but books that would have been unremarkable assignments back then are now very difficult for kids in the same grades. This isn't a problem with outdated vocabulary or anything like that—the trouble seems to be that they just can't follow sentences that have more than a couple simple clauses.

I dunno if that's fallout from some of the terser Moderns and their effects on popular preferences for prose structure, finally hitting in full force. Maybe? Seems like a long delay, though. I do suspect (relevantly to TFA, kind of!) some of it comes from publishers realizing how much of an advantage it is to make books hyper-palatable to their target markets, cutting anything that might be difficult. Sustained over decades, I'd expect that to gradually reduce reading skill levels. Maybe some of it's because people read way, way more amateur and otherwise very poor writing than they did before the Web and before smartphones—that actually lines up fairly well with the observations, since having home Internet access didn't break the 50% mark in the US until after 2000.

To my eyes schooling and academia have been trending toward "passing everyone" and not so much about educating and getting the kids to reach their academic potential. What we vulgarly call "dumbing down" of things. It looks like it dovetails with Bush's policies, or it could be part of a wider societal trend precipitated by mass/crass media, the emergence of texting as an acceptable mode of communication as well as terseness being seen as "alpha" (Jobs and Bezos being examples). Presumably society will adapt and us adapt back.

On the other hand, I will look forward to the comfort of not having to hear adolescent takes on Nietzsche or Kant.

"Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more."

Do you have a source for this? That's absolutely wild (though believable).

Here is one example: https://nceo.umn.edu/docs/presentations/nceo-lep-iep-ascdhan...

Did you link the correct document? This is about reading comprehension and the previous poster was asking for a source about class length (i.e. changing from the standard 50 minute class to classes of 10 minutes)

I don't see the conclusion in the data. 30 years ago people were complaining that best sellers had become too long (think of A Suitable Boy or Infinite Jest).

The data are interesting, but the conclusion of "because Internet" is neither supported or overturned by the data -- they don't explain that at all

It would have been nice if the data had gone back more than 10 years. When I read a classic I’m frequently stuck with how short they are - typically 200-300 pages. I don’t know how the authors felt when they were writing it - if they were pressured to cut what they thought was important material to fit publisher page limits. But I rarely feel like they are cramped or rushed, rather it is a breath of fresh air to read such good content in a small package rather than 400-450 pages that are merely okay.

My main problem with books and videos getting shorter every year is that the context that provides the insight for wisdom is missing.

Sure you can understand a concept because it is reduced in its most basic form or as understood by AI. But you don't know why it is important.

Even if you re-read the same concept multiple times in a book where it "could've been a blog post", you are training your ability for insight because you constantly enter the flow state while you're focusing.

It could also be caused by authors getting better at expressing themselves succinctly.

I think it's because publishers have loosened up a bit on their requirements and self-publishing is easier than ever. Traditionally, publishers wouldn't really invest in putting out short books aside from some notable exceptions.

There's also the "too big to edit" feature of many bestselling authors - look at the size of the Harry Potter books as an obvious example: (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxe... third image). When an author gets famous enough they apparently get edited less.

There may also be something about people not wanting to pay "full price" for a "thin book" but I doubt that's a major factor.

Good point. I've definitely seen follow ups to books that did well that just felt more sloppy. The sequel to Shantaram is a prime example.

Though I doubt many of the books on the NYT bestsellers list are self-published. In general though I agree with you. For a lot of non-fiction books 100 pages is probably plenty but, if you go through a publisher, you'll have to go longer. It's one reason I likely won't use a publisher again.

What kind of book did you put out? Do you feel like it was bloated as a result of going the traditional route?

The book I put out through a publisher (Apress) was essentially open source software (How Open Source Ate Software) for the business person who understands it's important but really doesn't know where to get started to learn about it and how it works from a community, development, and business perspective.

I did feel I was stretching to fill some pages in the first edition. That said, I was asked to do a second edition and it actually ended up a bit longer. I cut some "filler" that I didn't think was essential, reorganized, and dove more deeply into some topics (like legal matters with the assistance of a lawyer colleague) and I think it is now reasonably in right length territory; it covers a lot of territory.

Another book I self-published on software packaging broadly and its analogs to various things in the real world today and historically ended up around 100 pages.

An ancient affliction / a hopeless optimist wades in / the sound of denial.

I wish longer books would take advantage of shorter chapters. I generally tend to read to the end of a chapter, so if one takes me longer than an hour to work through, I find it more fatiguing than chapters that take 10-20 minutes.

EDIT: I realized my thought was incomplete: I find the longer chapters more fatiguing than the short ones, even if I read for the same duration overall.

The last 10 years isn't a great sample (was 2011 really not part of the "digital era"?). It'd be interesting to see this spread across the last century -- my suspicion is that bestsellers have increased in length over the last 50 years, due to diminished serialization.

Hmm.. I think they only got that long is because the writers were encouraged to do so. People expected higher word count to go along with higher prices.

Books didn't used to be all that long.

Agatha Christie novels were 40 - 60K words.

The Great Gatsby was around 50K IIRC.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskerville was 60K

Jaws was about 80K

I'm very okay with books being shorter. Most non-fiction bestsellers can be summarized in a blog post, and (in my opinion) most of them should be. With fiction, there is nothing inherently better about a long novel, nor is it intrinsic to the form. There are great long novels, and great short ones, but in general it seems like most of the long ones have some fat on them. Usually, with a really long novel, I don't think "they couldn't have cut out a single word!" Instead, it's "oh, this author has enough power that they can just ignore their editor."

Fat is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder (belistener). I love some good flowery language and I salute the authors who indulge their own love of beautifully descriptive language for my benefit. For fiction of course. I completely agree with you regarding non-fiction best-sellers.

I mainly buy books online and I don't really actively look at the page count before I buy a book. I can see that if you buy a book in a store you get a sense of the page count from the thickness and maybe some people dislike long books. Presumably though most books are now sold online and I wonder if other people do not check the page count either. I therefore wonder about the author's conclusion that it's reader driven or if it's more publishers choosing to publish shorter books and readers are just getting what they are given.

My speculation is that shorter books are read more often to the end and are recommended more often and more positively.

Recommendations that I get from short books often come with the added argument ”and it’s so quick to read, you will finish it in a week”.

Accordingly, when the recommended book is very long, it always comes with the caveat ”it’s long, though, worth it, but long”

I have had the same problem. Open the package you already feel like you've been scammed. Its almost makes it worth paying the extra to use regular bookshops again.

I recently finished a 1000 page biography about Willem van Oranje (not very interesting if you're not Dutch). I doubt the guy who wrote it will get rich but some books need to be written.

I hope for the death of the recipe book with a separate recipe for every sort of nut or berry or so on that you can put into a cookie or a muffin with extremely modest adjustment.

Makes sense. Best sellers historically have been primarily for entertainment, and we now live in a world primed for short-form entertainment.

The common wisdom a few years back was that a best seller should be short enough to finish cover to cover on a cross-country flight. It also wouldn’t surprise me if reductions in reading speed and literacy impact this as well.

I would love to see this broken out by fiction/non-fiction. I read mainly fiction and some stories just take longer to tell than others so I don't really take page count into consideration.

When I do read non-fiction I almost always think that the book could be improved by heavily editing down the second half.

I recall someone saying “Most non-fiction books really just have a 15 minute message.”

At least with fiction there can be some beauty in the extension.

I think that's true of most popular nonfiction. It gets less true fast as you move into more-serious writing and genres.

But, to be fair, that crappy airport-nonfiction self-help/lazy-(auto)biography/pop-business/pop-hustle-science almalgam-genre may well be most of the non-fiction that people actually read.

[EDIT] Well, that and True Crime, if we're counting that.

To me one definition of Great is that I get additional value in a second reading. In fiction Tolkien is the prime example. There are very few non-fiction authors this holds for. When I find them it’s a dangerous path as I want to read everything they ever wrote.

A lot of non-fiction books are IMO longer than they need to be, especially "business" books and things in that vein. Really fleshing out an idea takes more than a magazine article but a lot of the time it also doesn't really need a 250+ page book--but that's about the minimum that publishers will generally take on. One might have hoped that ebooks would have changed that but a lot of readers presumably would feel shortchanged paying regular book price for a 75-100 page book. But, as a publisher, my costs are pretty similar whether the book is 100 pages or 300 pages.

According to some Sam Harris podcast I vaguely remember listening to years ago, publishers generally don't want to publish short (like <200 page) books because they don't make enough money. Longer books are more profitable because the perceived value is higher so consumers are willing to pay higher prices for them, even though they don't cost much more to print.

Which is one reason why 90% of "business" books are forgettable wastes of paper that contain one or two ideas stretched out over 250 pages and serve little purpose except to advertise the author's consulting company.

I do think some historical background, case study examples, etc. can flesh out one or two basic concepts and help to give them more credibility and stickiness. But, yeah, even something like Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm probably could have been comfortably covered in 100 pages with room to spare.

Relatedly:

"The Murky Path To Becoming a New York Times Best Seller":

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-ne...

Would be curious to see this broken down by fiction vs non-fiction. I read very few non-fiction books cover-to-cover. Most of them could be probably cut by 50% and not lose much.

I feel like the page size in mass market paperbacks has also increased in size since high school/college. Perhaps it's just that I'm buying less-cheap prints?

The "trade" paperback size seems to have largely taken over from mass-market. Not completely, but there are definitely a lot more that size on the shelf than there used to be. Except in some genres, like romance, a section of which you can spot from a mile away because of all the short, uniform, mass-market volumes—but I think even there a lot of newer material's coming out in trade, and maybe hardback, and never seems to get a mass market format release. Especially true for the material marketed at the younger end of romance readers.

I expect interest in carrying books around is lower now. Pack it for vacation, maybe take it to the coffee shop or park, but how many of us still value a portable volume you can keep on you all the time, every day, just in case you have a moment to read? Phones fill that role, and then some, now. When you get ahold of one of those slim mid-century mass-market-size sci-fi paperbacks, and happen to be wearing a blazer or other jacket, you quickly discover why that length + size combo was so successful for popular fiction. It fits neatly in an outer jacket hip pocket, and hardly even messes up the drape of the fabric. Perfect for the 1940-1950s fella on-the-go. Can't do that with a trade paperback, nor with monster 400+ page Stephen-King-esque mass market volumes. A trim 200-280 pages in mass-market format is just the thing.

Before jumping to conclusions, it's ten years over a lot of centuries of book lengths

To be fair some of these books can be a blog post. Padding out the wazoo.

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