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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

The main reason not to write a book is that the topic doesn't need a book-length treatment, and would be better as an article. Fiction of course is one thing, but even then, some fictional ideas and personality combinations are better as short stories. Personally, as a reader, I find a lot of book ideas interesting (especially in the realm of popular science), but I can stomach very few of them because they are excessively wordy and often full of overly long (IMO) personal experiences.

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This is my #1 gripe with non-fiction books. Way too wordy, too many anecdotes, just spit it out already.

Please value my time as the reader. I read a lot of books, but I feel like I’m allocating more mental energy skimming half the content than I am absorbing knowledge.

37signals/Basecamp had some illuminating things to say about their book experiences. They kept fighting with the publisher to make their book short, the appropriate length. The publisher kept wanting it to be double the length to seem more impressive on the shelf.

That mindset is to the detriment of books, just get to the point.

Publishers in general want books that are 250+ pages. And that's probably too much for a lot of topics.

The one time I went through a publisher I definitely felt I was padding things. The second edition was better. I took out some of the padding and I fleshed out other topics that deserved it. It still barely made it to the 250-ish page point though.

Do you know what the 250 page target is based on? Knowing the underlying assumptions, metrics, KPIs, or whatever, could be helpful.

I don't. I assume it's economics in the sense that consumers are probably inclined to pay less for shorter books, there are a lot of largely fixed costs associated with publishing a book, may even be some pedestrian things like reading a title on the spine in a bookstore. Basically you need some starting hardcover or trade paperback price and work back from there. Amazon has doubtless changed some of the economics especially for ebooks. But, historically, you needed a hardcover you could sell for $25.

I've published a couple of fairly short books I didn't really care about charging for and they just wouldn't have been worth it for any publisher to feed into their funnel.

Only somewhat on point but here's something from the late 90s. https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html

Well, I think the problem is the market. When I was a teenager, I didn't mind reading all that stuff because it was all new to me. Now that I've read hundreds of books, I just want the new stuff, which occurs at more infrequent intervals in books do to past reading.

But people who have read a lot are not the main market for any book, unfortunately and seemingly paradoxically.

Books often overextend simple ideas but for some this is the way to understand maybe

> this is the way to understand maybe

I have this idea. Let's say I want to bring two words (AI and Apocalypse, Yud's thesis ) closer in some semantic space of ideas. How would I do it? I would write thousands of stories bring those two concepts together. Sort of like warping the space of ideas. Like a horseshoe. Subconsciously, if I want to guage the weightage of a particular thesis, my mind does it informally if it can pull many emotionally weighted instances in support of that thesis. The same applies to societies and groups.

"this book fills a much needed gap in the literature."

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