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Comment by nineplay | Hacker News Reader

I'm so weary of this sort of 'society is in decline' clickbait articles. Let's take some minimal amount of data, analyze it by some absurd criteria, and then present as some stunning insight.

There's so much wrong with this article that its hard to know where to start. The fuzziness of 'page count'. The absence of any consideration of digital readers and whether they even know the page count when starting a book.

Who ever said longer books are better than shorter books and how could they possibly justify that?

There's also trends that could easily account for this. Trilogies everywhere and one could argue that reading a trilogy is reading 1 large book vs 3 small books. Are graphic novels included?

It's all so silly

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No one said longer books are better? Good writing is often concise. And the article doesn’t at all conclude “society is in decline”. You seem to be the only one making these leaps and drawing these conclusions.

"Good writing is often concise" is flawed logic when relating to long books, except for myopic planners.

Reminds me of this joke https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/x4427j/todays_writ...

You don't get it, and you won't until you learn to enjoy literature at scale, that is reading authors by their complete works.

I don’t think society is in decline but my best friend is a university teacher and if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world and increasingly good with images and videos as a medium of communication. The shift seems real.

Long works of literature were always fairly niche. If you read the articles you will see that bestsellers are going from short to shorter rather a decline in the publication of long novels.

> if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world

Do you mean they are less familiar with certain books (like famous ones like Ulysses) or their ability to learn from written medium has reduced (concentration levels, speed of reading, etc.)?

From my experience as a secondary school teacher, it's the latter which then leads to the former. Kids can't read. I'd say in my last year teaching I probably only had three kids who I would consider literate, able to read and make inferences, think about the material they're reading, etc. There's several reasons for this (and not just social media -- they're often taught to regurgitate for the state exams), but it's a real issue.

Traditionally many authors were paid by words/pages. I’d imagine revenue has a lot more to do with the number of books sold nowadays. This isn’t new specifically to the time range studied in this article, but many of the classic novels that come to mind were definitely influenced by an incentive (other than content) for a higher word count.

Tolstoy, for example, took advantage of being paid by the amount of content by basically saying everything twice in a different way. This style makes for relaxed reading, because you’ll catch the content the second time if not the first, but it’s obviously not necessary. Dickens, as another example, also published less-dense material on a regular basis based on his contractual obligations (his novels actually read better if you follow the original publication schedule). His books were just part of another publication, basically a newspaper. As long as he delivered a satisfactory amount of core-story each week, he kept his job. This incentivized him to split up the best parts and add some fluff.

I’m no less satisfied by a good modern book than War and Peace. I enjoy both for different reasons.

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