: Re: Is being paid by the word/page making American books longer? I buy quite a lot of literature, mostly of academic nature. One thing I have noticed is that books by American authors always tend

@Kristi637

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Publishers believe that a minimum page count is required for a marketable book, but some subjects cannot cover the 200+ page minimums. These books gets padded with material that is easy to produce such as analyses of works of art and unnecessary detailed review of other works on the subject.

There is another problem. If you are an academic, chances are you are producing very little new knowledge. A new theory or any other important contribution to science is considered a great work for any academic but it is actually rare that such a work is produced. So, academics spend a lot of time on analysis, material that is easy to produce and requires no creativity. Some academics write many books on a subject that could be easily covered in a single book. It's a question of page quota but also production. That is why the quality of books by academics is dropping every year.

Aristotle would cover a subject fully in 40,000 or 60,000 words of dense meaning and only write a single book on the subject. The modern academic produces far less important work and tends to produce multiple book on a subject of limited depth and importance. There are techniques to do that sort of thing, and everybody is using them. The same applies to white papers and everything else in the academic world. These days, the production cost is very low and practically everyone writes books, so quality has naturally deteriorated. The reader will rarely find a good book on the subject and that's how it will be in the future.

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