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Comment by stocknoob | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 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.

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.

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.

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