People like content. More content is correlated with longer page counts. Longer page counts are correlated with higher retail prices. Someone said "I want to ma

People like content. More content is correlated with longer page counts. Longer page counts are correlated with higher retail prices. Someone said "I want to make more money" and the result was a set of incentives to pad out books with more pages of filler. Consumers have no reliable way of telling how much actual content is in a book. They only know the page count.