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Controversial opinion(?) I'm sick of finishing books with a strong sense that they were 300 pages just to appease the publisher/market, not because the author couldn't have been just as effective in 100 pages. I consider Derek Sivers a perfect counter example of this. Few books should need 300 pages.
3 months ago · 👍 astroseneca
Lots of cool perspectives here. Great example of why I value this community. ❤️ · 3 months ago
Non-controversial. Books should contain as many pages as needed. No limits both ways. · 3 months ago
Hot topic. There's an attention span issue and there's bad writing issues involved. There are other factors like the cost of the paper and the number of publishers. There's a "book as a product" issue too, where i.e. YouTubers write a book just to sell the audience to the publisher, replicating the social network filter in another media. · 3 months ago
Maybe this is the niche that Blinkest fills? I always hated the idea, but maybe it's the answer to cutting out the filler?
GRRM's A Song of Fire & Ice could fit in a single volume. Prove me wrong 🤣 · 3 months ago
Most books only have a couple of hundreds of essential text, the rest are often charts, tables with data, historical documents or annotations if it's fiction or some philosophy work — I won't necessary read all of it, and yet I'm grateful that this stuff is there, I don't think it would be better if such things were omitted.
Not reading all that is quite okay in my opinion — or giving up on the book entirely if you think it's badly written. · 3 months ago
Yeah, I think there's a difference that comes through when it's the author vs the publisher. SOme books need that volume. Att to Mark Twain- "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." Moby Dick is the best example of that I can think of. I'm sure Melville needed all that exposition and maybe a 19th c audience did too, but frankly I grew up with National Geographic and might know a bit about whales. Check out short story writers, it's the opposite idea, the publisher constrains them. Phillip K Dick was good for short stories. · 3 months ago
What about books that are 900+ pages? 🤣 · 3 months ago