TIL. This seems to be waste of paper/time for consumers.
What is the incentive for publishers by preferring wordy version than terse one? Is it because they afraid of being perceived as not worthy enough to be a book?
Holdover from another era. Pre-internet, we had more time to spend w/ books, and it was harder to gain context to make things make sense -- a little hand-holding and digression was more appropriate then.