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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

The books and movies parrallel feels pretty apt.

Most movies made today are still 1h30+ long, and I'm pretty sure all of those didn't come up with incredible stories that really warrant that length of time investment.

Movies could see a renaissance once we accept they can be any length, including 45min if that's all it takes to properly tell the story.

For books it's all the more obvious when we sometimes see a succesful blog post blowing up into a full blown book with no additional insight.

The issue is probably monetization and how to sell short content. I think it's hard, but also don't feel like throwing my time through the window as a result.

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But if you include TV with film, more and more people are willing to binge what is, essentially, a 10 hour movie. And freed from broadcast schedules, more series are experimenting with different episode lengths. This one needs an extra 20 minutes, whereas another episode is complete after 40 minutes.

Similarly, ebook readers, particularly ones with subscriptions like Kindle Unlimited, are consuming more novellas, which is an awkward length for a full priced, physical book since the (near) death of paper magazines and pulps.

Yes. I think there's many signs and stats that people are spending more time watching series, reading novels etc.

The interesting part to me is this seemingly paradoxical evolution of the contents getting shorter and more bit-sized, and us consuming more and more of it: if the "risk" associated is lower, people are more willing to give it a chance, and while we can spend 10h binging something, it only happens because we can stop at any moment and go do errands, answer a call, go to sleep when too tired etc. without too much disruption or missing out (at best we just need to rewatch the last 5 min of the previous episode to get back into the plot)

The other side of it being podcasts and audiobooks, who completely bypass the time commitment requirement by being parallel to everyday life.

All of this could happen with traditional media as well. We've all seen people standing in the middle of a movie and just get out, or skimming books, or just giving up after the first 2 chapters, but there was much more of a loss (in money and time) and it was socially thrown upon to a point I still have a hard time to understand.

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