I read the book, and I read the article that the book was based on. I don’t recall learning anything from the book that I hadn’t already learned from the article.
Though to be fair, sometimes those anecdotes are useful. I like examples, especially ones where an idea is applied to a situation that resembles my own. Also repetition is helpful to actually have a concept sink in.
Also, what's filler for you may be the most relevant section for someone else (e.g. an anecdote that matches their situation but not yours, or necessary repetition).
Also, I think software engineers, at least, have a bias to optimize for concision that can sometimes be counterproductive. For instance, I doubt a moderately long article that fully explains the core concept of cognitive behavior therapy would be as successful at actually changing the behavior of a depressed person than a more "redundant" book-length version. Maybe the short version would still work for some people, but that doesn't mean that's the best version for the majority of people.
If it takes repetition or length to do it, so be it.
Some books even recommend you read them a second time for that purpose, like Getting Things Done and How To Win Friends and Influence People.
I actually think this book is one of the rarer examples where the various stories and anecdotes that are sometimes seen (rightly) as “padding”, are actually in this case quite effective at getting the message across in quite a memorable way.
It’s been a while since I read it but I seem to recall a lot of similarly effective stories about airline pilots too.
On regular days with regular mood, I say it's just easy way of milking people, and that self-help genre died soon after being born, i.e. back in the days of Dale Carnegie.
Happened with all the self-help or self-improvement books I've touched.
The most excessive example of this being "getting things done" which was very trendy about ten years ago: the first third of the book were literally about the author bragging about results (but without any way to fact-check).
I've seen solo technical authors trying to sell concise ~100 page books and you often see comments like "that's too expensive, you can read it in a few hours and ebooks don't cost anything to produce!", ignoring the value of the information and how it's much more effort to be concise over verbose. I can see why there's a pressure to stretch text out to make it monitisable.
Are there good examples of authors making money from very short books or articles? I'm amazed there still isn't a web microtransactions solution yet so e.g. blog readers can tip a small amount with no effort so concise + valuable information can be monitised and encouraged.
1. adjusting the paper thickness
2. adjusting the font size
3. adjusting the line spacing
4. adjusting the margins
5. adding blank pages
The actual amount of text in a book varies dramatically.
So I know Refactoring UI did ridiculously well (https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1289702466754211842) for example while being concise.
One of the few actually good business books (Crossing the chasm) is a single drawing!
The worst thing about the book is all the self-congratulatory back patting, but I think that's comparably present in the article. I still often recommend the book.
With a book, you get the main ideas presented multiple times, applied, examined, refined, put in context, etc. Now, you’ll also forget all that apparently extraneous stuff, but at least you’ll remember the main ideas.
Non-fiction/fact-based/instructional books I flip-flop hard between enjoying a brief enchiridion on leadership and management styles one moment while cradling a tome of a physics text book the next.
Such indecisiveness heh.
The same is true for many articles: what I needed was a picture and a caption, what I got was 2000 words which didn’t add much at all.
Good writing of this kind makes its point right away and invites you to read more to expand on the point instead of holding the main idea hostage for most of the piece.
Another failure of the attention economy.
Naturally, I know that's not so simple, but it is one of the key issues I have with books that say the same thing over and over again — lack of respect for the reader.
1. A "core" that describes the motivation for the ideas and then the ideas (as in, what makes a checklist, how comprehensive do they need to be, basic ideas on how to store and maintain them).
2. An expanded form, providing more detail on the motivation (issues that could have been mitigated if not eliminated with checklists, areas where checklists have succeeded, more specific practices around checklists that worked for some people, for the reader's consideration).
This lets you skip the fluff if you've already been persuaded by going with (1), or if you need to be persuaded or want ideas on how to persuade others going with (2). A lot of useful material ends up suffering from self-obfuscation by only providing or too strongly pushing (2) and not (1).
Since there is the New Yorker article, in this case both (1) and (2) exist (after a fashion, it's been a few years since I read that article so I'm not sure anymore what's in it but it is much briefer than the book).