The book obesity problem

[oursin]

In an email exchange the other day I was bemoaning the excessive length that seems to be the Done Thing for so many genre books these days.

It was suggested to me that this was because of the rise of ebooks, but it seems to me that the biblio-BMI has been on the rise since well before ebooks were that much of a thing.

I don't know if you could go along my shelves and date the works by whether they were slimline volumes bringing in their story within a snappy 60K words, because there are doubtless some lengthier works of a similar vintage.

But while I have problems with page-bloat, I think the fact that books are getting so huge is another point in the case against people having No Attention Span because of Internetz.

(Am now wondering if there was a WOEZ WOEZ about the decline of C19th 3-decker novel attributing it to cheap popular titbitsy journalism...)