[Abomonog]

I think the answer for this is different for fiction and non-fiction. If I don't finish a non-fiction book, I still sometimes consider it "read", if I have gotten the gest of it. This is especially true if the author goes into more detail towards the end of the book after making their point. Non-completed fiction books I usually don't recommend to friends.

[astrofinch]

Am I the only one who finds popular nonfiction books bloated? So often it seems like the core ideas could've been expressed in one or two insightful blog posts.

[kalid]

I just wrote a comment on the same! I completely agree. I feel there's a pressure to fill some artificial page count requirement.

I read "The Evolution of Cooperation" and it honestly could have been done in 30 pages. Instead, I foolishly suffered through 215 of them.

[Drbble]

Hence the executive summary industry for biz books.

[astrofinch]

Take it from this guy.

[sliverstorm]

It depends on the book. Take "On the Origin of Species". The core idea can be summarized in a few sentences. So why was it written? The reason you make something like that a full book is to recount experiences, anecdotes, speculation, experiments, etc to further support your core ideas. Unlike math, many fields are based on ideas that cannot stand on their own, and once upon a time there were no journals to publish in.

[smackfu]

Many of them are an expansion on a good long-form magazine article, and the material doesn't really merit book length. But the author certainly is not going to say that. So you end up with an uncut version of the article, plus some chapters on related stuff to pad out the page count.