Do you happen to have a good argument why the book proper couldn’t be 20% longer to better make their case?
I think there’s a curve of how many people pick up the book at all that depends on length. I didn’t do this estimation explicitly—and my guess is the authors and publishers were doing it implicitly instead of explicitly—but my guess is you get something like 20% fewer readers if the book is 20% longer, and the number of additional people who find it convincing with 20% more length is something like 5% of readers, and I think that means increasing the length is suboptimal.
(Like, in my favorite world we could A/B test this with the ebook or w/e, where we dynamically include material and see which pieces to include, or have something Arbital-style where people can expand sections for elaboration as needed. But this is very challenging to do with a physical book.)
I’ll just say I strongly disagree that 20% more length means 20% fewer readers. I would think it wouldn’t change readership much at all. The people who would read such a book wouldn’t drop off quite so dramatically.
I think there’s a curve of how many people pick up the book at all that depends on length. I didn’t do this estimation explicitly—and my guess is the authors and publishers were doing it implicitly instead of explicitly—but my guess is you get something like 20% fewer readers if the book is 20% longer, and the number of additional people who find it convincing with 20% more length is something like 5% of readers, and I think that means increasing the length is suboptimal.
(Like, in my favorite world we could A/B test this with the ebook or w/e, where we dynamically include material and see which pieces to include, or have something Arbital-style where people can expand sections for elaboration as needed. But this is very challenging to do with a physical book.)
Yes, a test would be nice but impossible.
I’ll just say I strongly disagree that 20% more length means 20% fewer readers. I would think it wouldn’t change readership much at all. The people who would read such a book wouldn’t drop off quite so dramatically.