9 ms·

Bestselling books have been getting shorter

87 points by benbreen 4y ago

Jamesmoorez 4y ago
[dead]
tristor 4y ago
Makes sense. Best sellers historically have been primarily for entertainment, and we now live in a world primed for short-form entertainment. The common wisdom a few years back was that a best seller should be short enough to finish cover to cover on a cross-country flight. It also wouldn’t surprise me if reductions in reading speed and literacy impact this as well.
mc32 4y ago
Many things are competing for people's attention combined with people's ability to stay focused[1] going down may contribute to this. This is probably to be expected as we take the discipline out of people. [1] Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I know a lot of teachers and have heard some pretty dire reports about trends in reading skills in students. Even the "advanced" kids are tripped up by sentences as complex as the sort that were common in juvenile literature of the postwar 20th century. This wasn't the case 15 years ago, but books that would have been unremarkable assignments back then are now very difficult for kids in the same grades. This isn't a problem with outdated vocabulary or anything like that—the trouble seems to be that they just can't follow sentences that have more than a couple simple clauses. I dunno if that's fallout from some of the terser Moderns and their effects on popular preferences for prose structure, finally hitting in full force. Maybe? Seems like a long delay, though. I do suspect (relevantly to TFA, kind of!) some of it comes from publishers realizing how much of an advantage it is to make books hyper-palatable to their target markets, cutting anything that might be difficult. Sustained over decades, I'd expect that to gradually reduce reading skill levels. Maybe some of it's because people read way, way more amateur and otherwise very poor writing than they did before the Web and before smartphones—that actually lines up fairly well with the observations, since having home Internet access didn't break the 50% mark in the US until after 2000.
  - mc32 4y ago
    To my eyes schooling and academia have been trending toward "passing everyone" and not so much about educating and getting the kids to reach their academic potential. What we vulgarly call "dumbing down" of things. It looks like it dovetails with Bush's policies, or it could be part of a wider societal trend precipitated by mass/crass media, the emergence of texting as an acceptable mode of communication as well as terseness being seen as "alpha" (Jobs and Bezos being examples). Presumably society will adapt and us adapt back. On the other hand, I will look forward to the comfort of not having to hear adolescent takes on Nietzsche or Kant.
  - onetokeoverthe 4y ago
- CadmiumYellow 4y ago
  "Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more." Do you have a source for this? That's absolutely wild (though believable).
  - mc32 4y ago
    Here is one example: https://nceo.umn.edu/docs/presentations/nceo-lep-iep-ascdhandoutchunking.pdf https://nceo.umn.edu/docs/presentations/nceo-lep-iep-ascdhan...
    - mitchdoogle 4y ago
      Did you link the correct document? This is about reading comprehension and the previous poster was asking for a source about class length (i.e. changing from the standard 50 minute class to classes of 10 minutes)
IMSAI8080 4y ago
I mainly buy books online and I don't really actively look at the page count before I buy a book. I can see that if you buy a book in a store you get a sense of the page count from the thickness and maybe some people dislike long books. Presumably though most books are now sold online and I wonder if other people do not check the page count either. I therefore wonder about the author's conclusion that it's reader driven or if it's more publishers choosing to publish shorter books and readers are just getting what they are given.
- soneca 4y ago
  My speculation is that shorter books are read more often to the end and are recommended more often and more positively. Recommendations that I get from short books often come with the added argument ”and it’s so quick to read, you will finish it in a week”. Accordingly, when the recommended book is very long, it always comes with the caveat ”it’s long, though, worth it, but long”
- rr888 4y ago
  I have had the same problem. Open the package you already feel like you've been scammed. Its almost makes it worth paying the extra to use regular bookshops again.
msmenardi 4y ago
It could also be caused by authors getting better at expressing themselves succinctly.
- recuter 4y ago
  An ancient affliction / a hopeless optimist wades in / the sound of denial.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  I think it's because publishers have loosened up a bit on their requirements and self-publishing is easier than ever. Traditionally, publishers wouldn't really invest in putting out short books aside from some notable exceptions.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    There's also the "too big to edit" feature of many bestselling authors - look at the size of the Harry Potter books as an obvious example: (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxed-set-books-1-7-j-k-rowling/1108948862 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxe... third image). When an author gets famous enough they apparently get edited less. There may also be something about people not wanting to pay "full price" for a "thin book" but I doubt that's a major factor.
    - j0hnyl 4y ago
      Good point. I've definitely seen follow ups to books that did well that just felt more sloppy. The sequel to Shantaram is a prime example.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Though I doubt many of the books on the NYT bestsellers list are self-published. In general though I agree with you. For a lot of non-fiction books 100 pages is probably plenty but, if you go through a publisher, you'll have to go longer. It's one reason I likely won't use a publisher again.
joshuahedlund 4y ago
> We analyzed 3,444 titles that were ranked top3 on NYT weekly bestseller lists from 2011 to 2021 A little less than never.
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, we've narrowed the scope of the title above. Thanks!
bogomipz 4y ago
Relatedly: "The Murky Path To Becoming a New York Times Best Seller": https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-new-york-times-best-seller-lists-explained/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-ne...
UIUC_06 4y ago
It is true that literary agents are less likely to take on a book that's "difficult" in any way, and "too long" is one of those ways. As slimy as they are, they do have a sense of what publishers want, who in turn have a sense of what readers want. And lots of people do not want to read books anymore, broadly speaking. There are too many other entertainment options.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think fiction books that aren't extremely light reading are headed the way of classical music: a thing most people find too difficult to get into, and too dull until they've put in that effort, so it's coded as a "smart (and/or pretentious) people thing" and most folks just won't engage with it at all.
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    I think you're right, but it goes a step father. They then associate that with reading in general, and liking books. Then they start to believe that self-insert dystopian YA is just as literary as, say, actual dense literature that explores the human condition. Or they make books their personality, without ever reading them. r/books is full of examples like this, where it almost seems they talk more about the idea of reading than they do the books, while also constantly seeking validation for not even attempting something challenging.
- blockwriter 4y ago
  There are a select few agents who specialize in literary fiction. If you start a naive search of literary agents, you will find that their stated interests zero in on books that are of the political moment. The majority of agents are looking for a book, preferably young adult fiction, that focuses on a protected class, of which the author should also be a member. This is not a complaint, but the evident regression to the mean, which is really no more than an acknowledgment of market forces, is available at a glance. Books are no longer commodities whose primary purpose is to be read. Rather, they are meant to capture an upswing of interest in a particular topic, and then become more widely celebrated than widely considered. The fact is that most works of literary fiction written today are simply not up to snuff. Although there are writers devoted to their vocation, they lack a context in which to work. Literary agents cannot contribute to the process of writing. A kind of grassroots appreciation of the benefits intrinsic to reading and writing literature needs to take place, in my opinion, if we are to produce any great works of literature.
laura_g 4y ago
I'm not sure why page count instead of word or character count is used - feels like there could easily be external factors such as page size or typeface that are effecting this.
- yojo 4y ago
  That was my first thought. Maybe it’s not “books are getting shorter,” but “publishers are getting cheaper.” Decreasing margins, decreasing font size, etc could all explain a diminishing page count to save on printing costs. That said, from looking into publishing, it seems like consensus is anything over 100k words (approx 400 pages) is basically unsellable unless you’re Stephen King or something. It’s not clear to me if this has always been the case.
  - elmomle 4y ago
    Many of the longer novels in classic literature were originally serialized, and only later compiled into the lengthy tomes we know today.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      Yep! Count of Monte Cristo is known as a long read but it was originally serialized. You can kinda tell too, the plot meanders a couple times. Nonetheless extremely entertaining, I'd highly recommend.
      - mtillman 4y ago
        Same for Count of Monte Cristo and some of his other works. Also Don Quixote if I recall correctly. I actually read them one to two chapters a week to stay on a similar to original schedule.
        cptnapalm 4y ago
        I have wondered if the reading of Don Quixote serially was a very different experience from reading it as a novel. It was a serial satire, so I could see reading the "new episode" every week being funny. Before I got side-tracked, I was reading it like any other novel and, while any particular episode is set up comedically, Don Quixote's mostly harmless delusional actions being given exponentially more brutal responses I found increasingly depressing.
teeray 4y ago
I wish longer books would take advantage of shorter chapters. I generally tend to read to the end of a chapter, so if one takes me longer than an hour to work through, I find it more fatiguing than chapters that take 10-20 minutes. EDIT: I realized my thought was incomplete: I find the longer chapters more fatiguing than the short ones, even if I read for the same duration overall.
sergiotapia 4y ago
To be fair some of these books can be a blog post. Padding out the wazoo.
greggarious 4y ago
Is shorter worse? I recently checked out "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire", one of the volumes on the list in my little black book from back before Kiva Han became a Chase Manhattan branch, and was surprised how thin it is. (I also begrudgingly reread Lolita and Animal Farm, both of which aren't exactly War and Peace in terms of page count... believe it or not, you can use "GRE words" outside the GRE when writing literature.) Maybe folks should worry about whether their book will be read for generations instead of being payola'd into some airport lobby.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Must be a heavily abridged version. My full edition of RaFotRE is over 2000 pages in 3 volumes.
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    Are you sure you're not thinking of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"? That book is extremely long. I haven't heard of the book "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" but it might be this one from 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25686327-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25686327-the-rise-and-fa...
    - greggarious 4y ago
      Can you post the ISBN? I suspect I got the wrong one, and Amazon owns goodreads. (You'd be amazed the adventures you have at the library if you tell them you're doing a series of inter library loans because you're worried the Saudis owned your phone and Bezos can't be trusted.)
zwieback 4y ago
I would love to see this broken out by fiction/non-fiction. I read mainly fiction and some stories just take longer to tell than others so I don't really take page count into consideration. When I do read non-fiction I almost always think that the book could be improved by heavily editing down the second half.
- mathattack 4y ago
  I recall someone saying “Most non-fiction books really just have a 15 minute message.” At least with fiction there can be some beauty in the extension.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I think that's true of most popular nonfiction. It gets less true fast as you move into more-serious writing and genres. But, to be fair, that crappy airport-nonfiction self-help/lazy-(auto)biography/pop-business/pop-hustle-science almalgam-genre may well be most of the non-fiction that people actually read. [EDIT] Well, that and True Crime, if we're counting that.
    - mathattack 4y ago
      To me one definition of Great is that I get additional value in a second reading. In fiction Tolkien is the prime example. There are very few non-fiction authors this holds for. When I find them it’s a dangerous path as I want to read everything they ever wrote.
- ghaff 4y ago
  A lot of non-fiction books are IMO longer than they need to be, especially "business" books and things in that vein. Really fleshing out an idea takes more than a magazine article but a lot of the time it also doesn't really need a 250+ page book--but that's about the minimum that publishers will generally take on. One might have hoped that ebooks would have changed that but a lot of readers presumably would feel shortchanged paying regular book price for a 75-100 page book. But, as a publisher, my costs are pretty similar whether the book is 100 pages or 300 pages.
nineplay 4y ago
I'm so weary of this sort of 'society is in decline' clickbait articles. Let's take some minimal amount of data, analyze it by some absurd criteria, and then present as some stunning insight. There's so much wrong with this article that its hard to know where to start. The fuzziness of 'page count'. The absence of any consideration of digital readers and whether they even know the page count when starting a book. Who ever said longer books are better than shorter books and how could they possibly justify that? There's also trends that could easily account for this. Trilogies everywhere and one could argue that reading a trilogy is reading 1 large book vs 3 small books. Are graphic novels included? It's all so silly
- elliekelly 4y ago
  No one said longer books are better? Good writing is often concise. And the article doesn’t at all conclude “society is in decline”. You seem to be the only one making these leaps and drawing these conclusions.
  - ngoilapites 4y ago
    "Good writing is often concise" is flawed logic when relating to long books, except for myopic planners.
    - trgn 4y ago
      Reminds me of this joke https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/x4427j/todays_writers_vs_victorian_writers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/x4427j/todays_writ...
      - ngoilapites 4y ago
        You don't get it, and you won't until you learn to enjoy literature at scale, that is reading authors by their complete works.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  I don’t think society is in decline but my best friend is a university teacher and if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world and increasingly good with images and videos as a medium of communication. The shift seems real. Long works of literature were always fairly niche. If you read the articles you will see that bestsellers are going from short to shorter rather a decline in the publication of long novels.
systems_glitch 4y ago
I feel like the page size in mass market paperbacks has also increased in size since high school/college. Perhaps it's just that I'm buying less-cheap prints?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The "trade" paperback size seems to have largely taken over from mass-market. Not completely, but there are definitely a lot more that size on the shelf than there used to be. Except in some genres, like romance, a section of which you can spot from a mile away because of all the short, uniform, mass-market volumes—but I think even there a lot of newer material's coming out in trade, and maybe hardback, and never seems to get a mass market format release. Especially true for the material marketed at the younger end of romance readers. I expect interest in carrying books around is lower now. Pack it for vacation, maybe take it to the coffee shop or park, but how many of us still value a portable volume you can keep on you all the time, every day, just in case you have a moment to read? Phones fill that role, and then some, now. When you get ahold of one of those slim mid-century mass-market-size sci-fi paperbacks, and happen to be wearing a blazer or other jacket, you quickly discover why that length + size combo was so successful for popular fiction. It fits neatly in an outer jacket hip pocket, and hardly even messes up the drape of the fabric. Perfect for the 1940-1950s fella on-the-go. Can't do that with a trade paperback, nor with monster 400+ page Stephen-King-esque mass market volumes. A trim 200-280 pages in mass-market format is just the thing.
karaterobot 4y ago
I'm very okay with books being shorter. Most non-fiction bestsellers can be summarized in a blog post, and (in my opinion) most of them should be. With fiction, there is nothing inherently better about a long novel, nor is it intrinsic to the form. There are great long novels, and great short ones, but in general it seems like most of the long ones have some fat on them. Usually, with a really long novel, I don't think "they couldn't have cut out a single word!" Instead, it's "oh, this author has enough power that they can just ignore their editor."
- trey-jones 4y ago
  Fat is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder (belistener). I love some good flowery language and I salute the authors who indulge their own love of beautifully descriptive language for my benefit. For fiction of course. I completely agree with you regarding non-fiction best-sellers.
Jamesmoorez 4y ago
thenerdhead 4y ago
My main problem with books and videos getting shorter every year is that the context that provides the insight for wisdom is missing. Sure you can understand a concept because it is reduced in its most basic form or as understood by AI. But you don't know why it is important. Even if you re-read the same concept multiple times in a book where it "could've been a blog post", you are training your ability for insight because you constantly enter the flow state while you're focusing.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Hmm.. I think they only got that long is because the writers were encouraged to do so. People expected higher word count to go along with higher prices. Books didn't used to be all that long. Agatha Christie novels were 40 - 60K words. The Great Gatsby was around 50K IIRC. Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskerville was 60K Jaws was about 80K
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
I recently finished a 1000 page biography about Willem van Oranje (not very interesting if you're not Dutch). I doubt the guy who wrote it will get rich but some books need to be written.
klodolph 4y ago
IMO most popular non-fiction books don't have enough content to justify their length. I'm not saying that the content is bad, or you shouldn't buy the book. The book is just padded out so you feel better about buying it. Who would buy a 40-page book for $15? The book gets padded out to 200 pages by repeating itself, adding filler sections, anecdotes, graphic design choices, etc. I am happy to see books get shorter if it means that they have less filler.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  That's something I have noticed with a lot of programming books. They are super long and are just pages of unfocused blablabla and screenshots. I miss books like K&R that are well written and concise. Problem is that padding most non-fiction books is really easy while padding a fiction book is hard. So expect non-fiction to get longer and fiction to get shorter.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I've heard that if you write a technical book on programming and work with a publisher, they'll encourage you to stick code listings in your book.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Actually, as a writer of two fiction books: it's really easy. You just include more pointless description. Some popular fiction writer (James Patterson? not sure) said, paraphrasing, "You know all those parts you tend to skip over? I just don't write those."
    - rocketbop 4y ago
      He doesn't write those, but he works with a team of writers to deliver books at the cadence he does, so probably he meant someone else writes those.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
gumby 4y ago
I don't see the conclusion in the data. 30 years ago people were complaining that best sellers had become too long (think of A Suitable Boy or Infinite Jest). The data are interesting, but the conclusion of "because Internet" is neither supported or overturned by the data -- they don't explain that at all
- pavon 4y ago
  It would have been nice if the data had gone back more than 10 years. When I read a classic I’m frequently stuck with how short they are - typically 200-300 pages. I don’t know how the authors felt when they were writing it - if they were pressured to cut what they thought was important material to fit publisher page limits. But I rarely feel like they are cramped or rushed, rather it is a breath of fresh air to read such good content in a small package rather than 400-450 pages that are merely okay.
crclist 4y ago
I hope for the death of the recipe book with a separate recipe for every sort of nut or berry or so on that you can put into a cookie or a muffin with extremely modest adjustment.
abiro 4y ago
Would be curious to see this broken down by fiction vs non-fiction. I read very few non-fiction books cover-to-cover. Most of them could be probably cut by 50% and not lose much.
fedeb95 4y ago
Before jumping to conclusions, it's ten years over a lot of centuries of book lengths
woodruffw 4y ago
The last 10 years isn't a great sample (was 2011 really not part of the "digital era"?). It'd be interesting to see this spread across the last century -- my suspicion is that bestsellers have increased in length over the last 50 years, due to diminished serialization.

87 points by benbreen 4y ago

[dead]

Makes sense. Best sellers historically have been primarily for entertainment, and we now live in a world primed for short-form entertainment. The common wisdom a few years back was that a best seller should be short enough to finish cover to cover on a cross-country flight. It also wouldn’t surprise me if reductions in reading speed and literacy impact this as well.

mc32 4y ago

Many things are competing for people's attention combined with people's ability to stay focused[1] going down may contribute to this. This is probably to be expected as we take the discipline out of people. [1] Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I know a lot of teachers and have heard some pretty dire reports about trends in reading skills in students. Even the "advanced" kids are tripped up by sentences as complex as the sort that were common in juvenile literature of the postwar 20th century. This wasn't the case 15 years ago, but books that would have been unremarkable assignments back then are now very difficult for kids in the same grades. This isn't a problem with outdated vocabulary or anything like that—the trouble seems to be that they just can't follow sentences that have more than a couple simple clauses. I dunno if that's fallout from some of the terser Moderns and their effects on popular preferences for prose structure, finally hitting in full force. Maybe? Seems like a long delay, though. I do suspect (relevantly to TFA, kind of!) some of it comes from publishers realizing how much of an advantage it is to make books hyper-palatable to their target markets, cutting anything that might be difficult. Sustained over decades, I'd expect that to gradually reduce reading skill levels. Maybe some of it's because people read way, way more amateur and otherwise very poor writing than they did before the Web and before smartphones—that actually lines up fairly well with the observations, since having home Internet access didn't break the 50% mark in the US until after 2000.
- mc32 4y ago
  To my eyes schooling and academia have been trending toward "passing everyone" and not so much about educating and getting the kids to reach their academic potential. What we vulgarly call "dumbing down" of things. It looks like it dovetails with Bush's policies, or it could be part of a wider societal trend precipitated by mass/crass media, the emergence of texting as an acceptable mode of communication as well as terseness being seen as "alpha" (Jobs and Bezos being examples). Presumably society will adapt and us adapt back. On the other hand, I will look forward to the comfort of not having to hear adolescent takes on Nietzsche or Kant.
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago
CadmiumYellow 4y ago
"Universities discussing whether classes should be delivered in 10 minute chunks because students can no longer stay focused for 50 mins to an hour any more." Do you have a source for this? That's absolutely wild (though believable).
- mc32 4y ago
  Here is one example: https://nceo.umn.edu/docs/presentations/nceo-lep-iep-ascdhandoutchunking.pdf https://nceo.umn.edu/docs/presentations/nceo-lep-iep-ascdhan...
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    Did you link the correct document? This is about reading comprehension and the previous poster was asking for a source about class length (i.e. changing from the standard 50 minute class to classes of 10 minutes)

IMSAI8080 4y ago

I mainly buy books online and I don't really actively look at the page count before I buy a book. I can see that if you buy a book in a store you get a sense of the page count from the thickness and maybe some people dislike long books. Presumably though most books are now sold online and I wonder if other people do not check the page count either. I therefore wonder about the author's conclusion that it's reader driven or if it's more publishers choosing to publish shorter books and readers are just getting what they are given.

soneca 4y ago
My speculation is that shorter books are read more often to the end and are recommended more often and more positively. Recommendations that I get from short books often come with the added argument ”and it’s so quick to read, you will finish it in a week”. Accordingly, when the recommended book is very long, it always comes with the caveat ”it’s long, though, worth it, but long”
rr888 4y ago
I have had the same problem. Open the package you already feel like you've been scammed. Its almost makes it worth paying the extra to use regular bookshops again.

msmenardi 4y ago

It could also be caused by authors getting better at expressing themselves succinctly.

recuter 4y ago
An ancient affliction / a hopeless optimist wades in / the sound of denial.
j0hnyl 4y ago
I think it's because publishers have loosened up a bit on their requirements and self-publishing is easier than ever. Traditionally, publishers wouldn't really invest in putting out short books aside from some notable exceptions.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There's also the "too big to edit" feature of many bestselling authors - look at the size of the Harry Potter books as an obvious example: (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxed-set-books-1-7-j-k-rowling/1108948862 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxe... third image). When an author gets famous enough they apparently get edited less. There may also be something about people not wanting to pay "full price" for a "thin book" but I doubt that's a major factor.
  - j0hnyl 4y ago
    Good point. I've definitely seen follow ups to books that did well that just felt more sloppy. The sequel to Shantaram is a prime example.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Though I doubt many of the books on the NYT bestsellers list are self-published. In general though I agree with you. For a lot of non-fiction books 100 pages is probably plenty but, if you go through a publisher, you'll have to go longer. It's one reason I likely won't use a publisher again.

joshuahedlund 4y ago

> We analyzed 3,444 titles that were ranked top3 on NYT weekly bestseller lists from 2011 to 2021 A little less than never.

dang 4y ago
Ok, we've narrowed the scope of the title above. Thanks!

bogomipz 4y ago

Relatedly: "The Murky Path To Becoming a New York Times Best Seller": https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-new-york-times-best-seller-lists-explained/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-ne...

UIUC_06 4y ago

It is true that literary agents are less likely to take on a book that's "difficult" in any way, and "too long" is one of those ways. As slimy as they are, they do have a sense of what publishers want, who in turn have a sense of what readers want. And lots of people do not want to read books anymore, broadly speaking. There are too many other entertainment options.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I think fiction books that aren't extremely light reading are headed the way of classical music: a thing most people find too difficult to get into, and too dull until they've put in that effort, so it's coded as a "smart (and/or pretentious) people thing" and most folks just won't engage with it at all.
- dorchadas 4y ago
  I think you're right, but it goes a step father. They then associate that with reading in general, and liking books. Then they start to believe that self-insert dystopian YA is just as literary as, say, actual dense literature that explores the human condition. Or they make books their personality, without ever reading them. r/books is full of examples like this, where it almost seems they talk more about the idea of reading than they do the books, while also constantly seeking validation for not even attempting something challenging.
blockwriter 4y ago
There are a select few agents who specialize in literary fiction. If you start a naive search of literary agents, you will find that their stated interests zero in on books that are of the political moment. The majority of agents are looking for a book, preferably young adult fiction, that focuses on a protected class, of which the author should also be a member. This is not a complaint, but the evident regression to the mean, which is really no more than an acknowledgment of market forces, is available at a glance. Books are no longer commodities whose primary purpose is to be read. Rather, they are meant to capture an upswing of interest in a particular topic, and then become more widely celebrated than widely considered. The fact is that most works of literary fiction written today are simply not up to snuff. Although there are writers devoted to their vocation, they lack a context in which to work. Literary agents cannot contribute to the process of writing. A kind of grassroots appreciation of the benefits intrinsic to reading and writing literature needs to take place, in my opinion, if we are to produce any great works of literature.

laura_g 4y ago

I'm not sure why page count instead of word or character count is used - feels like there could easily be external factors such as page size or typeface that are effecting this.

yojo 4y ago
That was my first thought. Maybe it’s not “books are getting shorter,” but “publishers are getting cheaper.” Decreasing margins, decreasing font size, etc could all explain a diminishing page count to save on printing costs. That said, from looking into publishing, it seems like consensus is anything over 100k words (approx 400 pages) is basically unsellable unless you’re Stephen King or something. It’s not clear to me if this has always been the case.
- elmomle 4y ago
  Many of the longer novels in classic literature were originally serialized, and only later compiled into the lengthy tomes we know today.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    Yep! Count of Monte Cristo is known as a long read but it was originally serialized. You can kinda tell too, the plot meanders a couple times. Nonetheless extremely entertaining, I'd highly recommend.
    - mtillman 4y ago
      Same for Count of Monte Cristo and some of his other works. Also Don Quixote if I recall correctly. I actually read them one to two chapters a week to stay on a similar to original schedule.
      - cptnapalm 4y ago
        I have wondered if the reading of Don Quixote serially was a very different experience from reading it as a novel. It was a serial satire, so I could see reading the "new episode" every week being funny. Before I got side-tracked, I was reading it like any other novel and, while any particular episode is set up comedically, Don Quixote's mostly harmless delusional actions being given exponentially more brutal responses I found increasingly depressing.

teeray 4y ago

I wish longer books would take advantage of shorter chapters. I generally tend to read to the end of a chapter, so if one takes me longer than an hour to work through, I find it more fatiguing than chapters that take 10-20 minutes. EDIT: I realized my thought was incomplete: I find the longer chapters more fatiguing than the short ones, even if I read for the same duration overall.

sergiotapia 4y ago

To be fair some of these books can be a blog post. Padding out the wazoo.

greggarious 4y ago

Is shorter worse? I recently checked out "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire", one of the volumes on the list in my little black book from back before Kiva Han became a Chase Manhattan branch, and was surprised how thin it is. (I also begrudgingly reread Lolita and Animal Farm, both of which aren't exactly War and Peace in terms of page count... believe it or not, you can use "GRE words" outside the GRE when writing literature.) Maybe folks should worry about whether their book will be read for generations instead of being payola'd into some airport lobby.

TylerE 4y ago
Must be a heavily abridged version. My full edition of RaFotRE is over 2000 pages in 3 volumes.
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  Are you sure you're not thinking of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"? That book is extremely long. I haven't heard of the book "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" but it might be this one from 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25686327-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25686327-the-rise-and-fa...
  - greggarious 4y ago
    Can you post the ISBN? I suspect I got the wrong one, and Amazon owns goodreads. (You'd be amazed the adventures you have at the library if you tell them you're doing a series of inter library loans because you're worried the Saudis owned your phone and Bezos can't be trusted.)

zwieback 4y ago

I would love to see this broken out by fiction/non-fiction. I read mainly fiction and some stories just take longer to tell than others so I don't really take page count into consideration. When I do read non-fiction I almost always think that the book could be improved by heavily editing down the second half.

mathattack 4y ago
I recall someone saying “Most non-fiction books really just have a 15 minute message.” At least with fiction there can be some beauty in the extension.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think that's true of most popular nonfiction. It gets less true fast as you move into more-serious writing and genres. But, to be fair, that crappy airport-nonfiction self-help/lazy-(auto)biography/pop-business/pop-hustle-science almalgam-genre may well be most of the non-fiction that people actually read. [EDIT] Well, that and True Crime, if we're counting that.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    To me one definition of Great is that I get additional value in a second reading. In fiction Tolkien is the prime example. There are very few non-fiction authors this holds for. When I find them it’s a dangerous path as I want to read everything they ever wrote.
ghaff 4y ago
A lot of non-fiction books are IMO longer than they need to be, especially "business" books and things in that vein. Really fleshing out an idea takes more than a magazine article but a lot of the time it also doesn't really need a 250+ page book--but that's about the minimum that publishers will generally take on. One might have hoped that ebooks would have changed that but a lot of readers presumably would feel shortchanged paying regular book price for a 75-100 page book. But, as a publisher, my costs are pretty similar whether the book is 100 pages or 300 pages.

nineplay 4y ago

I'm so weary of this sort of 'society is in decline' clickbait articles. Let's take some minimal amount of data, analyze it by some absurd criteria, and then present as some stunning insight. There's so much wrong with this article that its hard to know where to start. The fuzziness of 'page count'. The absence of any consideration of digital readers and whether they even know the page count when starting a book. Who ever said longer books are better than shorter books and how could they possibly justify that? There's also trends that could easily account for this. Trilogies everywhere and one could argue that reading a trilogy is reading 1 large book vs 3 small books. Are graphic novels included? It's all so silly

elliekelly 4y ago
No one said longer books are better? Good writing is often concise. And the article doesn’t at all conclude “society is in decline”. You seem to be the only one making these leaps and drawing these conclusions.
- ngoilapites 4y ago
  "Good writing is often concise" is flawed logic when relating to long books, except for myopic planners.
  - trgn 4y ago
    Reminds me of this joke https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/x4427j/todays_writers_vs_victorian_writers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/x4427j/todays_writ...
    - ngoilapites 4y ago
      You don't get it, and you won't until you learn to enjoy literature at scale, that is reading authors by their complete works.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I don’t think society is in decline but my best friend is a university teacher and if you allow me an anecdote it’s become obvious to him in the past five years that first year students are less and less familiar with the written world and increasingly good with images and videos as a medium of communication. The shift seems real. Long works of literature were always fairly niche. If you read the articles you will see that bestsellers are going from short to shorter rather a decline in the publication of long novels.

systems_glitch 4y ago

I feel like the page size in mass market paperbacks has also increased in size since high school/college. Perhaps it's just that I'm buying less-cheap prints?

yamtaddle 4y ago
The "trade" paperback size seems to have largely taken over from mass-market. Not completely, but there are definitely a lot more that size on the shelf than there used to be. Except in some genres, like romance, a section of which you can spot from a mile away because of all the short, uniform, mass-market volumes—but I think even there a lot of newer material's coming out in trade, and maybe hardback, and never seems to get a mass market format release. Especially true for the material marketed at the younger end of romance readers. I expect interest in carrying books around is lower now. Pack it for vacation, maybe take it to the coffee shop or park, but how many of us still value a portable volume you can keep on you all the time, every day, just in case you have a moment to read? Phones fill that role, and then some, now. When you get ahold of one of those slim mid-century mass-market-size sci-fi paperbacks, and happen to be wearing a blazer or other jacket, you quickly discover why that length + size combo was so successful for popular fiction. It fits neatly in an outer jacket hip pocket, and hardly even messes up the drape of the fabric. Perfect for the 1940-1950s fella on-the-go. Can't do that with a trade paperback, nor with monster 400+ page Stephen-King-esque mass market volumes. A trim 200-280 pages in mass-market format is just the thing.

karaterobot 4y ago

I'm very okay with books being shorter. Most non-fiction bestsellers can be summarized in a blog post, and (in my opinion) most of them should be. With fiction, there is nothing inherently better about a long novel, nor is it intrinsic to the form. There are great long novels, and great short ones, but in general it seems like most of the long ones have some fat on them. Usually, with a really long novel, I don't think "they couldn't have cut out a single word!" Instead, it's "oh, this author has enough power that they can just ignore their editor."

trey-jones 4y ago
Fat is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder (belistener). I love some good flowery language and I salute the authors who indulge their own love of beautifully descriptive language for my benefit. For fiction of course. I completely agree with you regarding non-fiction best-sellers.

Jamesmoorez 4y ago

thenerdhead 4y ago

My main problem with books and videos getting shorter every year is that the context that provides the insight for wisdom is missing. Sure you can understand a concept because it is reduced in its most basic form or as understood by AI. But you don't know why it is important. Even if you re-read the same concept multiple times in a book where it "could've been a blog post", you are training your ability for insight because you constantly enter the flow state while you're focusing.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Hmm.. I think they only got that long is because the writers were encouraged to do so. People expected higher word count to go along with higher prices. Books didn't used to be all that long. Agatha Christie novels were 40 - 60K words. The Great Gatsby was around 50K IIRC. Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskerville was 60K Jaws was about 80K

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

I recently finished a 1000 page biography about Willem van Oranje (not very interesting if you're not Dutch). I doubt the guy who wrote it will get rich but some books need to be written.

klodolph 4y ago

IMO most popular non-fiction books don't have enough content to justify their length. I'm not saying that the content is bad, or you shouldn't buy the book. The book is just padded out so you feel better about buying it. Who would buy a 40-page book for $15? The book gets padded out to 200 pages by repeating itself, adding filler sections, anecdotes, graphic design choices, etc. I am happy to see books get shorter if it means that they have less filler.

rqtwteye 4y ago
That's something I have noticed with a lot of programming books. They are super long and are just pages of unfocused blablabla and screenshots. I miss books like K&R that are well written and concise. Problem is that padding most non-fiction books is really easy while padding a fiction book is hard. So expect non-fiction to get longer and fiction to get shorter.
- klodolph 4y ago
  I've heard that if you write a technical book on programming and work with a publisher, they'll encourage you to stick code listings in your book.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Actually, as a writer of two fiction books: it's really easy. You just include more pointless description. Some popular fiction writer (James Patterson? not sure) said, paraphrasing, "You know all those parts you tend to skip over? I just don't write those."
  - rocketbop 4y ago
    He doesn't write those, but he works with a team of writers to deliver books at the cadence he does, so probably he meant someone else writes those.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago

gumby 4y ago

I don't see the conclusion in the data. 30 years ago people were complaining that best sellers had become too long (think of A Suitable Boy or Infinite Jest). The data are interesting, but the conclusion of "because Internet" is neither supported or overturned by the data -- they don't explain that at all

pavon 4y ago
It would have been nice if the data had gone back more than 10 years. When I read a classic I’m frequently stuck with how short they are - typically 200-300 pages. I don’t know how the authors felt when they were writing it - if they were pressured to cut what they thought was important material to fit publisher page limits. But I rarely feel like they are cramped or rushed, rather it is a breath of fresh air to read such good content in a small package rather than 400-450 pages that are merely okay.

crclist 4y ago

I hope for the death of the recipe book with a separate recipe for every sort of nut or berry or so on that you can put into a cookie or a muffin with extremely modest adjustment.

abiro 4y ago

Would be curious to see this broken down by fiction vs non-fiction. I read very few non-fiction books cover-to-cover. Most of them could be probably cut by 50% and not lose much.

fedeb95 4y ago

Before jumping to conclusions, it's ten years over a lot of centuries of book lengths

woodruffw 4y ago

The last 10 years isn't a great sample (was 2011 really not part of the "digital era"?). It'd be interesting to see this spread across the last century -- my suspicion is that bestsellers have increased in length over the last 50 years, due to diminished serialization.