[marklgr]

You don't have to do away with the storytelling structure; just make it significantly shorter and designed for information retention. Quite a few books contain a good deal of filler to reach the 250+ page threshold for marketing purposes.

A longer book is correlated, in the audience mind, with more content, more research done, more of an investment to read it hence more of a payoff ("it's a book you have to study"), and also more time spent reading it so potentially more pleasure, even for non-fiction.

Unfortunately, when you read a lot, these propositions start to become cons, and you'd often rather have just the meat--granted, not in a plastic plate, to run the culinary metaphor, but not with the three-hour ceremonial of the (would-be) fancy restaurant either.

[mercer]

I agree to an extent, but I've come to believe that the 'padding', often just examples that are variations of each other, is much more useful than it appears at first.

When I think back to books that I've read that felt like they had too much filler, I have to admit that many of the memories are the concepts via the anecdotes.

[marklgr]

So perhaps the author shot a lot of anecdotes at you and a few stick, but another author could have done the same job with half as many pages. Again, I'm not against storytelling or anecdotes.

[mercer]

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I've all but stopped reading the books that are mostly anecdotes with about an A4's worth of actual information.

[aaachilless]

I think we’re talking about two different ideas. It seems like you’re talking about a publishing problem, not a problem with books qua books. That said, I haven’t ran into this other problem either. If I thought an author was padding a book just to make a page threshold, I’d never read that author again.

[marklgr]

Ah, maybe we're talking of different things indeed. As for the padding, in my experience it happens very often, not with random sentences of course, but with unnecessary chapters, paraphrasing, too many anecdotes etc. If you think about it, it's not that surprising: why every idea worth a book should need 250+ pages to discuss? What about the many blog posts or TED talks artificially turned into a book, for money and prestige?