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And of course the real title is "The big question: are books getting longer?".
Re: article, it's disheartening that good books suffer from this as well. I've recently read "The power of habit" and "Think fast and slow". Both are great, but both would be much better at the half of their size.
For most non-fiction content the magazine article is too short (3-8 pages) and only skims over the issue. It's evident when you read an article on something you're very familiar with. However book is too long (300 pages) and introduces filler and repetitions. I find that Special Reports from The Economist are quite good in size and depth (15-30 pages). My ideal would be around 100 pages, but those reports are still my go-to place if I want to read something.
> Both are great, but both would be much better at the half of their size.
This brings to mind a comment Jason Fried made in Rework:
“Writers eliminate good pages to make a great book. We cut this book in half between the next-to-last and final drafts. From 57,000 words to about 27,000 words. Trust us, it’s better for it.”
Spaced repetition is good for memory[0]. When I read on a subject I will usually read several books in the same area spread out over 6-8 months to reinforce those memories. I felt the repetition in 'Thinking Fast and Slow' helped me soak up and retain the ideas much better, although I've probably forgotten much of that book by now.
I read this policy paper on nuclear weapons that I found in the trash near my house. It consisted of five essays, each essay critiquing the prior essays. The repetition combined with argumentation had a powerful effect and forced me to engage in thinking about the issue under discussion. I wish more books would do that. It was around 80 pages which was a perfect length.
Any pointers to that nuclear policy paper? (ideally other than digging through my neighborhood's trash cans)
We subconsciously equate size with value. A physical book sitting on a shelf benefits from being (or looking) large, especially if it costs $15. Digital books don't suffer from the misconception and lots of independently written books are shorter than those intended for print. That's my perception, anyway. I'd be curious to see hard numbers comparing book sizes between those intended for print and those that are e-book only.
> And of course the real title is "The big question: are books getting longer?".
But the body of the article contains nothing to the contrary, so it seems the submitter's edit was in keeping with the guidelines (i.e. change the title if it is misleading).
You misunderstood me. I was not criticising the submitter, kudos for the change. I was criticising the clickbaity title of the article.
This is more extreme now where our attention jumps from link to link. We can't separate this issue from the Internet era.
>citing studies showing that only 60% of books bought electronically are ever begun, and completion rates that can fall as low as 20% for some titles.
Well, how about the completion rates of physical books? I am sure most people would rather read smaller, to the point books if they could. Moreover, there are also social brownie points associated with buying thick books. If everyone is talking about it, buying that popular book in physical form will increase the aesthetic look of my "home library" and then when people come over, I can show off how well read I am.
Also the top comment on the article page importantly notes:
"AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!
Count the words, not the pages!!!! Some simple typesetting changes can increase or decrease a books page count significantly.
A bigger book may look more intimidating, but it may also look like better value for money, and if production/material costs have gone down over the last 15 years, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a publisher bumps up the paragraph spacing and brings in the page margins to make a book appear longer than it is."
Isn't this a bit skewed though? I've not read maybe half the books in my library, but that's simply because either I bought something like a humble bundle where I was only really interested in 2-3 of them anyway, or because I bought whole series at discounted price and stopped after first two books.
Kind of similar to Steam games - 37% of games were never played. If I can get a set of Witcher 1,2,3 for the price of one + $1, then I'm definitely getting all of them, even if I'm really interested in the third one only right now.
I'm definitely more likely to finish a kindle book, just because I almost always have it with me.
Aaron Swartz had some interesting things to say about the length of most non-fiction:
Came to say something along these lines. Often books say very little in as many words as possible. Part of a 'more stuff for your money' philosophy.
Textbooks have this problem as well until you hit graduate subjects.
A lot of the best graduate textbooks are pdfs of lecture notes. 40 pages, no nonsense.
I wonder if Amazon (and other e-book reader vendors) can do something about this. Add a feature to trim the book only to the pages or sections that people have highlighted, shared, spent time on the most.
I'm pretty sure that I would have put Anathem away if I had it in paper. Unfortunately it wasn't and I was trapped in a good example of an horribly overstretched big book.
Sometimes there is a good idea hidden in those kind of books but most of the times it's just a cheap shallow story you've read before in a different setting. I consider it a sign that the author either was forced to write a sequel/prequel or that he's just a bad writer. Most of the times, I don't touch those authors works again.
I enjoyed all of Anathem and would have happily read another 500 pages of it. Not sure if Stephenson is the best example, his long book style is quite unique. Usually it works for me (Anathem, Cryptonomicon, I've read both at least twice) other times it doesn't (The baroque series I haven't finished). Snow crash and Zodiac are examples of him writing shorter good books too.
Yes, I fell for a urgent recommendation by a person like you ;)
I have no idea how you can cope with all that utter irrelevance in this. While reading I started thinking that Stephenson tried to create a "moment" by overstreching. A scenery. Something you see in those slow artistic movies for example. But then there is another problem. Stephenson is unable to describe the environment in which the scene plays. Instead he concentrates on completely irrelevant details in the current area. A good example for this was when the protagonist traveled a region where former cities were. It looked like that: "...traveling along those dead cities we've learned to distinguish the time period in which the cities have been build...". But he describes not a single one. You end up having absolutely no picture of the environment. He tells you that there are launch pads and anti-missile turrets but not how they look. Instead he drags you through several sentences regarding the steel rubble they get from the cities. Spoiler: it's rusty. Same poor writing goes for character development (main character is supposed to be clever according to the context but is plainly stupid and really slow...), basic aspects like the love story or the weird way he describes women.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just too demanding but I currently read through some of Alestair Raynolds works and it makes Stephenson look like a rich school boy whos private teacher was afraid to mark the basic mistakes for him.
I've read Snow Crash many years ago. When Neuromancer and the art of those times was still in my head. Fortunately because it was exactly the same thing. Please read Snow Crash again and try to focus on the world he un-describes. I had the feeling like Stephenson took it for granted that you've already read Gibson or Sterling and knew how the world is supposed too look like so he can concentrate on world details that are completely irrelevant for the story and make no sense without describing the place they stand in.
You see...I fell twice for Stephenson which was a mistake on my side so I'm pretty angry on myself and try do divert the fault to him...
Stephenson is interesting that way - I think his finest book is "the diamond age", which does not ramble, but his most enjoyable one (slightly more than diamond age even) is cryptonomicon, and the long digressions are precisely what makes it so enjoyable.
I wonder if this is true of self-published, ebook-first writers. In conversations with agents about my novels, I was told that they needed to be "longer" and that ~70K words wasn't enough or wasn't sufficiently "commercial." But in my view the novels were the appropriate length to the material (see http://jakeseliger.com/my-novels/ if you're curious). With ebooks, I don't think readers are subconsciously swayed by length as they are by physical books in bookstores.
Indie authors also often point out that they're better off splitting one massive tome into multiple parts. A novel like Neal Stephenson's Seveneves might've been split into three to five parts, with the first one given away and each additional part $.99 – $2.99 in its ebook edition.
EDIT: Also, I'm not opposed to being commercial, and indeed if I could think of more / better ways to be more "commercial" I'd do it!
Counter; installments (if you're a well known author) might mean you make less money, b/c people drop off after the first part & never buy the rest. Whereas before, even if they got bored & didn't finish it, they'd already paid in full.
(Installments aside, Seveneves needed heavy editing. Great plot, but probably about 1/3 cruft. I get it; you studied orbital mechanics & it's cool, but the 100th detailed explanation of orbital transfer is too much)
More orbital mechanics? There was a fair amount of that in Anathem as well. Sure the author is supposed to show-us-not-tell-us that characters are smart, but this handwaved now-they-work-a-physics-problem trope only gets about halfway there.
That depends on the cut the author would get from a publisher or leftover profit if they deal with the printing and distributing channels themselves. From the view of the buyer, it's really easy to rationalize the low cost of an ebook, and even if the first part is free, as long as it engages people enough most will come back for the latter parts. A regular physical book would need to engage people on the description to start with to convince people of the higher cost of it. Then there would be the people who sit down and read it through in the bookstore, they would need to be convinced enough of re-readability in order to buy it, or they become lost potential income, same as someone dropping a series after the first free ebook due to it not being interesting enough for them.
That is Stephensons style though. I think what Seveneves needed was a proper ending. It felt like he got bored and just threw together an end in like a tenth of the space it would have needed. Balance between the stories was off by a lot. Outside that, enjoyable.
This is strange to me since our attention spans are getting so much shorter.
I read only fiction, slightly less than a book a week. This year I've read books between 75 and 1200 pages and I dont think there is any correlation between length and my enjoyment.
I do notice that for many authors their self-proclaimed 'masterpiece' tends to be their longest book. And in many cases, not their best.
I think a lot of people read books with only partial attention; this helps to explain the five-star reviews of books stuffed full of absurdities.
True. I've been wondering why mainstream films are getting longer, too. 2-2.5 hours has become the norm.
Recently some more films have cropped up that are around 60 minutes - an awkward length somewhere between what you'd typically classify "short film" vs. "feature film". Because it's not clearly classifiable as one or the other, films of this length suffer uphill financing and marketability challenges. Unfortunate, because no length is strictly better than another, it's up to how the film works with the time it has. So it's encouraging to see some filmmakers work with the ~60 minute range now that there're more alternatives for commercially releasing a film these days.
What about netflix binge watching. Netflix stats show that some people like to spend a weekend watching a tv show in one big binge.
Depending on the exact film/genre I don't have a problem with that.
Probably about half of the novels I read could work just as well as short stories... (especially in science fiction.) It's like Strunk and White said: Omit Needless Words.
Sorta related to this topic, I'd suggest giving audiobooks a chance! They're definitely not for everyone, but I've become a huge fan. Every time I need to drive somewhere or I have to clean around the house, I play an audiobook.
They're also great if you lead a sedentary lifestyle (e.g. in front of computer all day). Reading books will probably necessitate more sitting around, but with audiobooks you can be a little bit more active and go out for a jog or walk.
+1 audio books
For me, I can digest one much quicker than reading.
I got a few from Audible this year. The content is great, but their one size fits all credit system is archaic. I would love to see a Spotify-like audio book subscription service.
I'm subscribed to Audible as well; I generally like it.
The 2 credit per month plan covers my needs pretty well. In some occasions I've had to buy extra credits, but it still ends up being much cheaper than buying individual audiobooks.
It definitely pushes you to strike a balance between longer and shorter books, though. It's kinda crazy that a 4-hour story like The Magic Goes Away and a a 50-hour novel like A Dance with Dragons both end up consuming 1 credit.
Unfortunately I can't even read a book cover to cover, only skim through interesting parts.
I think this applies to a vast majority of people outside the academic environment (or once they leave that environment). I really wonder why that is.
I've definitely noticed my mind wander once I start reading a book. It seems like we can all benefit from training our attention span.
With some books on history i noticed that the author has reworked his PhD thesis into a book - now that's a long bummer by definition, If that is the case then that makes the book quite long to start with - (i think that's the right thing to do BTW).
One example:
The PhD thesis: "Political Protest and Dissent in the Khrushchev Era" by Robert Hornsby" (342 pages)
the book would be "Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union" by Robert Hornsby (324 pages)
> completion rates that can fall as low as 20% for some titles.
I have so many books to read, that I don't bother finishing a book unless it's really good. The "some titles" are probably simply poor books.
Also, the number of pages isn't necessarily a good indicator of size. The typography can greatly influence the number of words on a page, and the typography can and does vary widely.
Is there anywhere that extremely well thought out and detailed short stories could thrive? I want to find those.
I've read plenty of long books in my lifetime.
Kind of off topic but it always bugs me when I see people using 'average' as a metric. Average is awful, it is a lossy metric that doesn't capture distribution. What if there are only very big books (600+ pages) and very small books (100 pages), we can end up with an average of 325 pages which is actually not any book.
Difficult to assess objectively, but I wonder if the quality has degraded accordingly (eg. due amateur self-publishing)? In my experience, being more concise so as to produce better writing is difficult and time intensive -- a la the famous Blaise Pascal quote:
> I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
From the title I was expecting a line chart of average book length over time.
Is there an API to get book metadata for all books?
For short bs we now have the internet.
nah, fonts are getting larger and whitespace is ballooning :)
just kidding, I wouldn't know for sure, but this article should have graphs of wordcounts or something.
I like really long non-fiction series. A 100,000 words is just a starting point. But to get there, it has to keep my interest for that long.
Worm Web Serial is pretty good. A couple of 'down' spots but I devoured it in a couple weeks.
"It totals roughly 1,680,000 words"
Here's one that must be a million words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Lyndon_Johnson