[markkanof]

Yes, that attitude seems fairly prevalent. I read a lot of Amazon reviews suggesting the same idea, that you should basically be paying by the number of pages. What that fails to acknowledge is that distilling ideas down to just the important parts is hard work. It's possible that a short book doesn't cover the topic very well, but I think it's more likely that the author has worked really hard to express their ideas in the fewest number of pages possible.

Lately I have decided that I won't even buy computer books that are more than ~300 pages, and I would prefer if they were more in the 100 to 200 page range. I'll take a short, concise, highly target book over a thousand page monster any day. And I'm more than willing to pay "full price" for the short book.