[reallydontask]

> Books as a medium actively encourage unnecessary verbosity.

From memory that is the main thesis of this article by Sam Harris (from the article):

>If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-future-of-the-book

[marginalia_nu]

I feel this is a consequence of how cheap books have gotten to produce.

Older books, the sort that were copied by hand onto calf skin, tend to have a lot less meandering filler than contemporary literature.

[adhesive_wombat]

And the "web-first long form" medium positively drips with filler. Half the time it doesn't even mention the subject at hand for 500 words until a tortured anecdote or analogy has run out of steam, leaving you guessing what the article is even about in the first place. Then it carries on for another few thousand words, at least 70% of which are useless flourishes or word count padding.

[hackerlight]

There's so much scope for improvement in pedagogy with better mediums. It'd be so good if college courses were presented in the format of an OurWorldInData page, perhaps with pop-out embedded video segments, instead of obscure disjointed lecture slides or a 2 hour long meandering video.

[tomByrer]

Yes, SEO advise for the past 7+ years is that 'Google likes those who are experts, so you have to have long essays to look like an expert & have longer time-on-page.'.

[falcolas]

It’s also a consequence of programs like “Kindle Unlimited” where your pay as an author is directly tied to how many pages are read.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah, there are several factors in this, for example a lot of people look at page counts (or book thickness) when deciding what to buy; thinking that thicker book = more information.

[hackerlight]

It's also that Paul Graham saying ~"books should be blog posts, blog posts should be tweets".

[dazc]

One of my favourite books is Longitude by Dava Soble. It's 224 pages yet conveys an epic and detailed account of an event in history that played out over a century.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientifi...

[satysin]

I recently read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear and felt exactly this. The book could have easily been one quarter the length and covered all the same material.

The contents of the book is quite good albeit not revolutionary. But it should have been around 60 pages not 270.

I actually found a fantastic short form version at https://www.chrisbehan.ca/posts/atomic-habits which is just as good as the book at explaining the concepts at a fraction of the read time. I advise anyone read that over the book.