Business books — even the insightful ones — are typically only 2-3 pages long (there a few, very few, exceptions). But that can’t sell at the airport so they are padded out like washing powder.
This is true of almost all business books as well. Typically they are a brief paper or even a single drawing ("crossing the chasm" is a single insightful drawing).
Unfortunately a four-page (or one-page!) book wouldn't sell particularly well. So like washing powder they are expanded with inert fillers.
Came here to say this. It's the same with text-like books. There's 100 pages of what you bought the book for, and 400 pages of filler at the end in an attempt to add more value.
This phenomenon affects almost all business books, which, even for some very good ones, are typically only a few pages long. In an extreme: Crossing the Chasm, which explains a powerful insght, is basically one diagram.
Few anecdotes from Amazon's folklore. "Why a six-pager has 6 pages?" A typical meeting at Amazon is 1 hour long -- 30 minutes reading followed by 30 minutes discussion. It is rumored that it takes Jeff Bezos 5 minutes to read and fully understand 1 page (10pt font, 1.2 line spacing). Hence 6 pages in 30 minutes. BTW, a six-pager can have an unlimited number of appendixes that do not count to the 6 pages limit. These appendixes provide extra in-depth info and often discussed during a meeting. But appendixes are not required reading. That said, quick readers oftentimes cover extra 10 pages during the silent portion of the meeting.
It's a 50-page book. If you actually look at what's presented on the landing page, three of the topics have the entire page shown, so you can see exactly what topics will look like.
When our authors ask how long their book should be I always say: Long enough to cover the subject, short enough to keep it interesting. My company is called No Starch Press for a reason. Think of the word starch as a nicer way to say "BS", as in No BS Press.
There's a lot of work behind these pages as with all of our books. Unlike any publisher in this field we have several people who read and craft every line of every book as necessary, together with each author, before a book goes off to a copy editor. That's where most books start but not hours.
The real cost in creating a good book is not in the paper. It's in the time it takes to actually craft the words.
All self-help books can be condensed to a few pages. 5 pages is probably on the high end.
I am an avid notetaker and most books I have read, I can summarize in less than a page, sometimes half a page. I do try to condense though, so 3 pages is probably realistic.
Funny, I prefer it being spread across 20 pages because then I can jump between the parts that interest me when they interest me, instead of having to load and scroll through the whole thing. It also affects how much detail they can put into the whole page vs individual pages.
They don't have to be 6 pages at Amazon (and the discussion starts after everyone's done reading, not after a prescribed 30-minute period). Oftentimes what is requested is a 2-pager. However, even the 6-page ones are not full of fluff; they're usually packed with data and analysis. Fluff tends to get pulled out pretty aggressively in favor of more information that's been requested sometime during the drafting and review process. By the time a document gets to Jeff, many eyes have seen it.
This style (and linkedin posts) remind me of one of Edward Tufte's observations, that business presentations and toddler's books have around the same words per page.
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