Yeah, maaaaaybe. My guess is you'd end up reading a lot of book chapters for the essay club. The problem I think is that the economics of writing books is muc

Yeah, maaaaaybe. My guess is you'd end up reading a lot of book chapters for the essay club. The problem I think is that the economics of writing books is much more author-friendly than writing longform articles. So by the time you put a shitpile of research into writing something /good/, you really should be writing a book. Even if the 'cream' of the content is about three chapters. And the rest of the deep dive is still worth it for many readers (and those who aren't reading the whole book for book club can still go back for the rest later, if they want to).