Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

IMO most popular non-fiction books don't have enough content to justify their length.

I'm not saying that the content is bad, or you shouldn't buy the book. The book is just padded out so you feel better about buying it. Who would buy a 40-page book for $15? The book gets padded out to 200 pages by repeating itself, adding filler sections, anecdotes, graphic design choices, etc.

I am happy to see books get shorter if it means that they have less filler.

View on HN

One thing to keep in mind is that for traditional publishers your book's spine needs to be thick enough to be visible on the shelf and not get lost between other books.

Good point. This made me appreciate how shops would also stack books in the "perpendicular" direction with the front cover being visible.

That's something I have noticed with a lot of programming books. They are super long and are just pages of unfocused blablabla and screenshots. I miss books like K&R that are well written and concise.

Problem is that padding most non-fiction books is really easy while padding a fiction book is hard. So expect non-fiction to get longer and fiction to get shorter.

I've heard that if you write a technical book on programming and work with a publisher, they'll encourage you to stick code listings in your book.

Actually, as a writer of two fiction books: it's really easy. You just include more pointless description.

Some popular fiction writer (James Patterson? not sure) said, paraphrasing, "You know all those parts you tend to skip over? I just don't write those."

He doesn't write those, but he works with a team of writers to deliver books at the cadence he does, so probably he meant someone else writes those.

I don't think so. I think he meant "that doesn't appear in my books." I'm sure he reads them over critically before sending them off.

anyhow, I'm not even sure he's the one who said that.

Brandon Sanderson wrote about his process of writing Mistborn and putting it through focus groups.

There were apparently several rounds of female readers complaining that he wasn't doing enough description of ballgowns.

My nightmare as a male writer :)

Fortunately I had a female editor who read over stuff like that with a critical eye. And no ball gowns in my books. I do have a wedding but I don't even mention what the bride was wearing. My bad.

A friend in the book business once told me that publishers like big thick programming books because they take up space on bookstore shelves and deny that space to rival books!

I suspect K&R may have been written initially as an internal reference (for AT&T).

Though it also pre-dated the era of mass-market computer books, say, 1995--2010 or so.

Oh man, it's SUCH a problem with non-fiction. Books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work are great, but both feel like they could easily be about half as long.

Many books are padded by:

1. using thicker paper

2. using a larger font

4. more spaces between lines

5. larger margins

6. a bunch of blank and/or pointless pages at the beginning

7. ad pages at the end

I see it all the time. A book's contents can vary 2:1 in length compared to another one of the same physical size.

Which is longer: a game of thrones #1 or Harry Potter #6... I think they're similar page lengths but got is probably at least 2x the words. Kindle sections or word count really do make more sense for pure length. But thickness and heft are real as well as is paper cost :).

I have the above analogy from teaching my kids not to be afraid of long books. It actually works both ways. "Look you finished hp6 when you were 12, got is like the same size don't be afraid."

I've never read Harry Potter #6, but AGOT#1 has more words than The Two Towers, and The Return of the King put together.

Each of AGOT #3 and #5 on their own have almost has as many words as the entire LOTR trilogy. And while there are a lot of memes about how half of those words are detailed descriptions[1] of incredibly elaborate meals, I wouldn't say that they detract from the story.

[1] Onion grease dribbling down double-chins as wedding guests are gorging themselves on large pies, wide as wagon wheels, stuffed almost to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, mushrooms, and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savory brown gravy.

if you look at the books themselves they're the same size but yes that was my point agot #1 is so so long. dude wrote so many words they made him split #4 into 2 books so the could make a paperback version.

293,000¹ vs 184,000², so about 1.6 times the word count.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#Publish...

² https://www.anycount.com/word-count-of-books/harry-potter-wo...

There's a great book by Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke, where an author of a well-received book decides to be his own publisher for his second book.

It's not long enough, so he does almost all those things you mention. It doesn't end well for him.

This going to sound silly but I hated reading the Pragmatic Programmer series of books because of the font and the size.

And listicles!!! ;-)

It’s amusing that people pay for page count and not the outcome. With travel, you pay more for faster shipping. Why not for transporting a good idea into your head?

Hmm, now that's interesting. I wonder what is the most someone would pay for a single sentence assuming it gives you the required information.

Executive summaries are part of the industry, where people boil down non-fiction books into short pieces of text. E.g. Blinkist (not affiliated, just the first result on Google)

It is somewhat funny that presumably a good amount of work goes into padding the book, and then work goes in on the other side to strip the padding away.

I don't know anyone who looks specifically at the page count over hype/reviews, but books are a physical media and people kinda have an idea of what a book should look like & cost. If we're really talking about 40 pp vs 200 pp., a hardbound 40 page book would look as silly on a shelf as you would reading it on the beach. Something that could be described as a pamphlet doesn't seem worth $15. Finding that tipping point of where a book looks like a book and also gets great reviews could be important.

People like content. More content is correlated with longer page counts. Longer page counts are correlated with higher retail prices. Someone said "I want to make more money" and the result was a set of incentives to pad out books with more pages of filler.

Consumers have no reliable way of telling how much actual content is in a book. They only know the page count.

Not so fast. I’d wager that repetitive padding is more effective at getting ideas into your brain for the same reason you don’t retain as much material from SparkNotes. There’s less exposure and time spent with the ideas in the shorter work.

As a teacher, I totally agree. Understanding something when the teacher presents material is not at all the same thing as digging in and trying some problems yourself.

I've noticed an enormous number of business and self-help books are little more than checklists. Each chapter's title is essentially "Do X", and the contents give examples of when someone "did X" in a specific scenario. "X" is often very general advice, so the examples usually lack nuance or depth, resulting in a whole lot of fluff

Actually, since I'm sorta on the producer end of that market:

Word count is much more often what people in the biz focus on. It eliminates all the talk about margins, leading, font, paper thickness, etc.

Word-count is what authors are concerned with.

Spine-width is what (physical bookstore) sales are based on, amongst other non-content factors.

Publishers who focused on quality and salient content (say, back in the day, O'Reilly, Wiley (technical), and No Start Press, over, say, SAMS and whoever put out the "in 24 hours" series of books (notoriously overpadded) got a significant reputation boost in my eyes. (ORA lost quite a few points rushing some shoddy junk to market, but their classic work was and remains excellent.)

Fantasy books are guilty as hell on this front.

I somewhat enjoyed The Wheel of Time, but the number of times the books had Nynaeve pulling her hair, or wearing a prettier dress than those made from stout two rivers wool - which she continued to maintain was just as good....

Sanderson seemed to cut that out (or at least back) after he took over the last three books.

If you think there is not enough information density in books, then books is the wrong format, use google/page hopping instead.

A book is more like a slow conversation/an opportunity to think about a topic.

Indeed, many non-fiction books seem to be really solid long form essays that were inflated with needless filler content to 100 pages. (Note I'm saying 'many' not 'all').

If you are correct, then the decrease in page length could just be the result of more people using ebooks, where the physical size of the book is of no consequence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com