The Sword and Laser discussion

It seems like so many popular books have page counts way higher than they should be. Often the lines are spaced so far apart and the text is big enough that it seems like a bit of smoke and mirrors on the publishers part to get you to pay more for a book. You buy a 350 page book that really should be more like 200 pages, a novella, really. This was really obvious to me just reading the Hunger Games over the weekend. Each page flip on my kindle was ~.75 "actual pages". Now I'm reading Steven Erikson's Dust Of Dreams and every 3 flips is an "actual page." That's like 4 times as much book once you figure in their page counts and they cost the same amount of money. Do things like this drive anyone else nuts? It seems really dishonest of the publishers.

I do wish that there was some consistent metric on Amazon (or wherever you are buying your books). Word-count would be ideal, but I suppose that would just encourage people to calculate the 'value' based on words per dollar/pound/euro when it's actually a much more nuanced judgement than that.

Really I want to know how much time I'd be investing in a particular book before I embark upon it.

Getting a sense of exactly what you're buying is one of the things you lose by not browsing physical book stores so often, I feel.

Once you have the book you can see "Typical time to read" in the "About This Book" section.

There is no reason Amazon couldn't put this on the "Product Details" of each book on the website. This would be a better guide of it's length.

I look at the page count which, as you said, is unreliable.

Tassie Dave wrote: "Once you have the book you can see "Typical time to read" in the "About This Book" section.

There is no reason Amazon couldn't put this on the "Product Details" of each book on the website. This w..."
I think the typical time to read is typically way off for me. While the Hunger Games may be a fast read it told me 4 hours was the typical time to read, that's almost superhuman.

Colin wrote: "Getting a sense of exactly what you're buying is one of the things you lose by not browsing physical book stores so often, I feel. "
This problem extends to physical books as well. The "real page counts" on Amazon refer to what the physical book has. I think it's especially insidious with physical books because the wider the binding the more space it takes up on the shelf and the more it stands out so there's more incentive to artificially inflate the page count.

Brad wrote: "It seems like so many popular books have page counts way higher than they should be. Often the lines are spaced so far apart and the text is big enough that it seems like a bit of smoke and mirrors..."

You should check the free sample if things like this bother you.

Brad wrote: "I think the typical time to read is typically way off for me. While the Hunger Games may be a fast read it told me 4 hours was the typical time to read, that's almost superhuman. "

In that case it's probably accurate because you can read the beginning, skip the middle 80% and go straight to the ending without missing anything. :p

Brad wrote: "I think the typical time to read is typically way off for me. While the Hunger Games may be a fast read it told me 4 hours was the typical time to read, that's almost superhuman."

I take longer than the "typical time" as well, but as long as they use a consistent rate for the timing, it is a better gauge of the book's length than "page count". Which varies widely because of line spacing, font size etc.

Yeah i wonder about how the 'typical time to read' is calculated. I assumed it was some dynamic metric based on measuring how long it took people took to read the kindle version. The dynamically calculated 'time left' is usually accurate for me, but it is always way over the 'typical time' calculation. Do the individual 'time left's contribute to average time to read?

A better metric for me is the audible narration length. Some narrators are faster than others, but generally I can calculate how long it takes me to read based on the narration length.

I.... what? You buy novels like you do produce, by the quantity? That's incredibly foreign to me. Some of the best classic SF is 200 pages. Some of the worst dreck I've read is 1000 pages. Longer isn't better, it's longer. Wheel of Time could be cut by hundreds of thousands of words and you'd lose nothing crucial.

Did you like the story? Was it fun, involving, satisfying? Then what's the issue, really?

^Protector is basically two short novellas jammed together, and is still the book I most recommend. I guess I understand why people like longer books in that if you like them you don't want them to end. Still, I'm now reading Reynolds' Terminal World, and it is 40% of the way through a 500 page book, and little has happened besides world building. I find myself skimming.

Brad wrote: "This was really obvious to me just reading the Hunger Games over the weekend. Each page flip on my kindle was ~.75 "actual pages". Now I'm reading Steven Erikson's Dust Of Dreams and every 3 flips is an "actual page."..."

Amazon bases their ebook counts off of print editions, so what you've described makes perfect sense to me.

Hunger Games is a YA book, and they probably took their page count from a YA edition - which often does have larger print, more space, etc. Whereas print versions of an epic fantasy door stopper are most likely to have tiny cramped print, cause they're trying to not make it so large it won't fall apart or be unwieldy.

They're meant to appeal to different audiences, so they're printed differently.

Melanti wrote: "Whereas print versions of an epic fantasy door stopper are most likely to have tiny cramped print, cause they're trying to not make it so large it won't fall apart or be unwieldy. "

Hah - I am reading Dust of Dreams now too. In the forward he said he had to split the book into two volumes since there was no bookbinding technology known to man that could contain it in a single edition. And the font is very small :)

I'm with Rick, I don't see what difference it makes - how many pages worth of words are in the book? I will glance at page count on Amazon before I buy, because I want to be sure I'm not paying $5 for a 10 page short story, but other than that...if I want to read it I buy it and I don't care how long it is - words-wise. I care if it's good or not.

It's not like it makes a huge difference in price - a new e-book nowadays is $13-$15ish, dropping down to $8-$10ish once the paperback is out - whether it has 400 or 800 pages. Then novella-length ebooks (around 100-200 pages) are around $3-$4. Pricing has nothing to do with actual number of pages - the paper is the most minimal of the costs. And sure, it's nice to save a few dollars on a story, but if I want to read it, then price is only a factor - like, can I buy this now or should I wait for a sale or maybe next week after payday or check the library?

And really, if you read a novella vs something like The Hunger Games - the length is noticeably shorter. The Hunger Games books read quickly because their writing is super-simplistic, not just because the publishers left a lot of empty space on each page.

Do you have some sort of reading schedule where you must finish a book within a certain time frame? Or are you keeping some kind of detailed logs about books read, with page number per hour as a factor and this "bloating" is throwing off your calculations?

I guess what I don't get is why it matters if the book has 250 pages worth of words but they stretch it out to 400 for ease of reading or to look better on the shelf. There is a definite word count that publishers use to determine if a story becomes a novella or a full novel - they have to because of marketing and everything else, like - most novellas aren't even produced as paper books unless it's a small print run. They aren't trying to trick people into spending a lot more money, they're being fairly realistic on what they can sell, in what categories and forms, at what prices, and how best to market things.

Given a choice between a 250 page novel and a 1000 page novel at the same price, and if I had no other information about either book, I'd be more likely to get the 250 page novel. Does anyone else feel the same?

Well, all of the 1000 page books I have read are SFF or biography and 250 pages are mostly YA/romance/mid grade children books so I will stick to the 1000-page one just so I could avoid some of those genres.

Brendan wrote: "Given a choice between a 250 page novel and a 1000 page novel at the same price, and if I had no other information about either book, I'd be more likely to get the 250 page novel. Does anyone else ..."
Eh. Not really. I get where you're coming from and I'd be skeptical of the 1000 page book not to have a ton of filler, but what I'd actually do is read the reviews, esp the 2 star ones. 1 star reviews tend to be too extreme, but 2 star reviews usually tell me if the things that really bother me are present in the book... and for the 1000 page book if it's a lot of fluff, that will come out in the reviews.

That's the thing - we almost always know much more about a book than just its length.

It was a thought experiment... reviews would be cheating.

I like to know roughly how long a book will take to read. Not so much to decide "if" I will buy it, but to know what I am in for.

You really need to be in the mood for a 1200 page epic fantasy.

I wouldn't start a book like that over summer, when I will not be stuck inside as much as I am now.

Some of what publishers do with type size, line spacing, and margins is a deliberate attempt to "hack your brain" as the Writing Excuses podcast put it. For example, when publishing a thriller, they intentionally want you to flip to a new page faster. This ups the tension as you read.

Some of the difference in word density (for lack of a better term) is due to conventions of the genre and how they want to impact you as you are reading it. It might be interesting to pay attention to the genre of stories you read and see how the word density changes. Keep in mind as well that books within a genre will have some differences. This season of Writing Excuses has looked at what they call Elemental Genres that are used to help tell stories.

I'm with Brendan-- my impulse is to go shorter. Mostly because right now I'm always reading fifteen different things for Grad School, and so my Fun Reading TIme is a precious thing. When there are fanvotes for S&L I typically vote for the shortest work (or the shortest of the ones that look interesting to me).

And time, rather than value, is I think why this weird variance in pagecount matters. When I buy a book and when I start a book I want to know how long it's going to take to me to finish.

Would you rather read an average but short book vs a great but longer one? That just seems bizzare to me. (You can say "but I'd read the reviews etc..." as I did, but Brendan's thought experiment is JUST knowing the page count.) Now, if I can read a great book that's short vs a great book that's longer? Honestly... the length just isn't going to matter. I might go shorter sometimes, longer other times.

Anyway, it's a bit of hyperbole as the choice is rarely between 250 and 1000, it's between 250 and 500 much more often.

And, why does it matter how long it takes to read something? So it takes a few more days... if longer book is much better, you're still better off in terms of quality/unit time. Unless, of course, you are doing the rather silly (to me) thing of trying to hit some arbitrary out of books read per year.

here's the thing... I love to read. But I'd rather read 12 awesome books in a year than 36 meh books. I'd rather read one long but great book over 2 weeks vs two shorter but average books that each take a week.

It has never occurred to me to think about this before. I often adjust my margins and font size on the Kindle, my Kindle screen is not as big as a dead-tree book page, and a thousand other factors that make my page-turning different to my Kindle-flipping.

As Shad mentioned about publishers hacking your brain (shout out to Writing Excuses, that podcast has taught me so much about how to read a book), you can ignore all that in an ebook form, which makes my reading experience more comfortable (and is one of the reasons I prefer to Kindle-read than dead-tree read).

I appreciate the 'time taken' feature, as I know I will have to double that for my reading speed; I do believe it's fairly accurate though, as my husband flies through books that fast (and, yes, has actually read and comprehended it all).

Colin wrote: "I do wish that there was some consistent metric on Amazon (or wherever you are buying your books). Word-count would be ideal, but I suppose that would just encourage people to calculate the 'value'..."

The capacity exists, because Amazon uses one internally. For Kindle Unlimited, their lending-library service, they used to dispense author royalties based on the number of people who checked out (or finished?) the title, but this led to some authors gaming the system by self-publishing a 15-30 page ebook every week, potentially racking up much higher royalties than novelists struggling to put out a 300-page book every 6-12 months. So Amazon developed some kind of word-count/page-count algorithm to dispense pro-rated royalties based on actual words/pages read. I assume they also use this to derive their "time to read" figures.

I just don't think they share this data with customers directly. They might share it with authors though.

Yes, Amazon will tell authors what their KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page) count is for a book. But as a note, the algorithm to determine that count is next to impossible to understand, and leads to complaints on the boards. Similar works can have very different KENP counts. KENP seems to mean whatever Amazon wants it to mean.

Shad wrote: "Some of what publishers do with type size, line spacing, and margins is a deliberate attempt to "hack your brain" as the Writing Excuses podcast put it. For example, when publishing a thriller, the..."
This is really interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way but it makes sense. I noticed John Sandfords books are this way and that lines up with the page turner aspect of this.

Rick wrote: "I.... what? You buy novels like you do produce, by the quantity? That's incredibly foreign to me. Some of the best classic SF is 200 pages. Some of the worst dreck I've read is 1000 pages. Longer i..."
The problem here is that it's totally dishonest and misleading stretching the page count like this. IMO a good 200 page book shouldn't cost as much as a good 1000 page book. How is it even remotely fair that I'm paying the same amount of money for the book that will only get me a few hours of entertainment? Look at movies vs. tv shows, buying a movie is way cheaper than buying a season of a tv show not because the tv show is inherently better but because there's so much more to it. And yes, there's some terrible 1000 page books but I've read some pretty awful 300 page books too. I've also read amazing books of all page counts. So basically what I'm trying to say is the quality of a book is totally irrelevant here. You can stretch a good book's page count and you can stretch a bad book's page count. Both are misleading and bad for the consumer.

Brad wrote: "Shad wrote: "Some of what publishers do with type size, line spacing, and margins is a deliberate attempt to "hack your brain" as the Writing Excuses podcast put it. For example, when publishing a ..."

But the price of a book doesn't come from how many pages or words it has in it. It comes from the compensation to the author, the editor, the agent, the cover artist, the graphic designer, the text setter/formatter, the publicity, the printers (if printed), the distributors, the sellers. And all that costs about the same whether it has 250 or 950 pages.

It's a totally different system to movies/TV - movies try to make back their money with huge box office success and now 2 hour movies cost around $15 per person in some theaters. But TV shows make their money through advertising that is based on how many people watch it and cable subscriptions. DVD sales of either are nice, but not crucial unless it wasn't very successful. And the audience for both of these is way beyond what most books can hope to have.

Still doesn't make sense that a 200 page book and 1000 page book would cost the same.

Rick wrote: "Would you rather read an average but short book vs a great but longer one? That just seems bizzare to me. ...why does it matter how long it takes to read something? So it takes a few more days... if longer book is much better, you're still better off in terms of quality/unit time. Unless, of course, you are doing the rather silly (to me) thing of trying to hit some arbitrary out of books read per year. "

Of course I'd rather read a grea book over an average book, regardless of length.

Turning to a different medium for a second: I would rather watch Lord of the Rings than The Big Bang Theory. But right now, when I want to watch something, I'm more likely to pull up an episode of television than I am a movie, and a 20-minute comedy at that. Not because I'm trying to watch As High A Number Of Things as I can, but because my time is very limited, and I would like to use it efficiently, so I can have a complete experience before I return to work-stuff. If I watch a movie, I know that is going to be all my free time that day, and probably my free time the next day too.

Brad wrote: "Still doesn't make sense that a 200 page book and 1000 page book would cost the same."

Some people read at twice the speed of others, should they pay half as much for a book?

EDIT: As for me, I would also choose a great longer book over an average shorter book, but I like sampling many authors, so if I'm reading long books then I may only be able to read 3-4 different authors in a month, rather than 8-10. Right now, I'm reading a really great, but also long, space opera novel. Loving the book, but I wish it was shorter, because in the time I've been reading it two books that I really, really want to read have just been released!

Brendan, I think that is a bit of a "red herring". The book is of a value of itself, not how we interact with it. I could say it was worth twice as much because I can rip out pages and start twice as many fires with it, and that wouldn't be a good argument either, and something I would never do either.

When it comes to the value of the book vs page count, this seems to be a very similar discussion to the ones we have had about e-books and price vs physical books. It comes down weather it is viewed as a piece of art that has the value added to it by all those that worked on it to get it to that point. Or it is viewed as a commodity that's only value is in either the physical copy, or the collection of bits on your device. I think most would say it is somewhere imbetween. Just where on the scale is what determines if you think a 1000 pager is worth significantly more then a 500 pager or not.

Brendan wrote: "Given a choice between a 250 page novel and a 1000 page novel at the same price, and if I had no other information about either book, I'd be more likely to get the 250 page novel. Does anyone else ..."

I feel this way, if the 250 page book is good I may have a new author to follow and thousands of more pages to read. If it's bad, ehhh not that much lost.

A 1000 page book however I can easily get bored in meh land 300 pages in, then either drop it or trudge on through. If it's good great, but if not it's painful.

Brad wrote: "Still doesn't make sense that a 200 page book and 1000 page book would cost the same."


Yeah we're not going to agree on this. The price of books is dirt cheap on a per hour basis if you want to view it that way (even a 5 hour book that costs $10 is $2/hour.)

Sorry, but I simply don't think of books that way - "How much am I paying per page/hour etc" is utterly irrelevant to me. If someone can tell a great story in 250 pages that's awesome. I've been given a great story. I don't want them to pad it out to 500 pages to satisfy word count pedants. I want, ideally, an immersive, compelling, enjoyable reading experience. 250 pages? Fine. 450pages? Great. Do what you need to, author, to give me the experience I'm after, but don't pad it to hit some word count. Tell your story, tell it well. Then type The End

One last note about price... many of us grab coffee at a Starbucks or similar. $4 for something we will quite literally piss away. Yet people will whine for hours about an extra $2 for a book that gives you hours of pleasure and can be returned to again and again.

I feel like this has gone off the rails. The original post wasn't about the merit of short books vs long but the dishonesty involved with stretching a page count. My hunger games vs dust of dreams example was just an example of this page stretching, one clearly stretched it and the other didn't.

It's common practice to charge less money for a novella. I don't know that I've ever seen one being sold for the same price as a novel. So when you stretch a novella over a novel's worth of pages by increasing line spacing, margins and text size that's just wrong. The publisher is deliberately trying to make more money off of less by saying it has more pages than it should have.

Completely agree with Rick (and others) on this one.

In fact, I am of the opinion that the "How much am I paying per page/hour etc" mentality is the issue with publishing at the moment. Big books are popular for the perceived money spent/time spent ratio but I wouldn't value books that way.

This issue is bigger in the gaming industry. If I buy a game at full price and finish it in a day, I feel robbed. But the idea of time spent = value has backfired as many games pad out the time by giving the player needless tasks (called 'farming') to make it take more time to beat without adding any real value.

I see this issue a lot with Fantasy novels, in particular. There is a push for longer books, but very rarely do I see a 1000 page book where, after having finished it, I think that it was a 1000 page value. On the flip side, it is rather rare that a 200 page book has any filler at all.

What's more, if a book is very good, I could read it multiple times.

Quality is likely a bigger factor than quantity (page count) in books, and yet that might be harder to spot when coming into/choosing books. It's too bad books don't come with the information about how much time was spent writing it, rather than how fast one could read it.

Look, Hunger Games is not a novella stretched out - I checked multiple sites and they all show it as having between 99,750 words and about 100,000.

A novella is under 40,000.

So if it's not a big deal to any of you then why don't the publishers just have a page count that isn't misleading and let the buyer decide if it's worth their money or not? I think the reason they don't do this is because they'd lose sales. Believe it or not for many people even buying a book is an extravagance because they're broke. If you could only buy one book to read for the next month how upset would you be that you blasted right through it because it had an artificially inflated page count?

Also, I keep seeing this "long books have filler" argument but that's frequently not the case. There are plenty of legitimately long books that are excellent. On the flip side there are plenty of short books that are filler/trash so please stop using this argument.

^You might as well just type 'don't post if you disagree with me'. That is the counter argument. One cannot simply equate the value of a book by its length. It is more complex than that.

And on the opposite side of the argument...

I can toss out this idea of the poor reader who cannot afford books that you stated in the proceeding post. Books are free. If the entire goal is just to read, regardless of quality, there are public libraries, free texts on the internet and most importantly: the public domain.

Brad wrote: "So if it's not a big deal to any of you then why don't the publishers just have a page count that isn't misleading and let the buyer decide if it's worth their money or not? I think the reason they..."
I don't think it matters for a lot of readers. Typically, different genres have suggested word counts that readers expect. Here is a website listing typical word counts by genre. As long as a book roughly matches the word count for its genre and is formatted like other books in its genre, most readers will be happy.

Looking at your two examples, Hunger Games is a YA novel, and a longer than typical one at that. Since those tend to be shorter and they are competing for the attention of younger adults, I can see why they might make the text and spacing larger to make the book easier to read to remove as much friction from the reading experience.

Steven Erikson's Dust Of Dreams is an epic fantasy weighing in at 370,000 words. If they used the same kind of typesetting on it as a YA novel, they might not be able to print it. I remember Brandon Sanderson mentioning that Words of Radiance was as big as a book as Tor could print. Granted, in addition to the 400k words, there were lots of pictures.

Due to the huge difference in genres, it really isn't fair to compare them. They have different readers who expect different things out of them. I typically ignore the page numbers when reading ebooks myself. They don't mean anything for an ebook and, as you have noticed, can sometimes be distracting.

J wrote: "^You might as well just type 'don't post if you disagree with me'. That is the counter argument. One cannot simply equate the value of a book by its length. It is more complex than that.

And on th..."
I'm just discussing the topic...Is that somehow wrong of me? If you're referring to my comment about not using the filler argument it's because it's an argument that's simply untrue. Some 1000 page books have lots of filler but it's not the case for many, a blanket statement like that is factually untrue. As for public libraries, I don't know about the libraries by you but the libraries here have absolutely terrible selection, probably because not very many people use them anymore. As for public domain this is a very small percentage of books. If someone wanted to read the newest book from Brandon Sanderson or something how does public domain help them?

Shad wrote: "Brad wrote: "So if it's not a big deal to any of you then why don't the publishers just have a page count that isn't misleading and let the buyer decide if it's worth their money or not? I think th..."
Hunger Games was just an example. I've read many an adult book that was stretched like this too.

Brad wrote: "So if it's not a big deal to any of you then why don't the publishers just have a page count that isn't misleading and let the buyer decide if it's worth their money or not? I think the reason they..."

Because, e-book page counts aren't entirely arbitrary. They're generally based off the page counts of physical books that are formatted in different fashions to appeal to different audiences

Print in YA books tends tends to the slightly larger size, especially compared to epic fantasy that tends to run tiny compared to practically any other sub-genre.

They do that for both marketing purposes and for practical considerations. Quite a few long epic fantasy books would have to be split into multi-volume books if they were printed with standard size font.



I've got to ask... Did you really expect Hunger Games to take you half as long as Dust Of Dreams just because it had half the number of pages? Even given an identical number of words, chances are that Hunger Games would take you far less time just due to the difference in writing styles.

Like I keep saying, that was just one example. It's more than just easier to read writing in any case. It takes less page flips per "page" on my kindle than Dust Of Dreams is what I meant. But yeah, I get that it's a YA novel, it was a poor choice of an example as I'm having to explain this over and over.

Brad wrote: "Like I keep saying, that was just one example. It's more than just easier to read writing in any case. It takes less page flips per "page" on my kindle than Dust Of Dreams is what I meant. But yeah..."

It' not just that Hunger Games is YA, it's that Dust of Dreams is epic fantasy - which is traditionally printed in minuscule font for very practical reasons.

And even though those practical reasons don't apply to the e-book format, the page counts carry over because it'd be strange to see a paperback having 800 pages and the e-book having 1,200.

For the sake of having a more meaningful conversation about this, can you remember any more adult books you have noticed this with?

Yeah, every John Sandford book for example. I've read physical copies of some of them too, they're pretty bad offenders.

Also, the Sookie Stackhouse books come to mind. There are others too just can't think of specifically which books are like this. I've read so many.

Brad wrote: "Yeah, every John Sandford book for example. I've read physical copies of some of them too, they're pretty bad offenders."

Just FYI, I looked up a few word counts for both Sandford's Prey books and Charlaine Harris' Sookie books - around 100k for Sandford and 90k for Harris.

Sandford's do seem a bit puffed out, since the books show up at 400-500 pages while the Sookie books are closer to 300 and that's a big difference for 10k words. Now, I haven't read any Sandford so I'm wondering if he does that thriller thing of one page (or very short) chapters which do waste some pages.

These are about the average number of words for a book nowadays - a book not epic fantasy anyway.

Now Dust of Dreams weighs in at 382k words - almost 4 times the average amount. You can bet they squeezed those words in as tightly as they could.

What this says to me is - your epic fantasy giant tomes are a great bargain, if you're looking at $$ per word. And most everything else you've mentioned is just the average size and the average price.

That's just my take on it.

I've seen tightly packed pages like this in other genres too. Sci-fi for sure and just plain old fiction. John Irving comes to mind as something I've recently read with similar density. Stephen King comes to mind too.

Brad wrote: "So if it's not a big deal to any of you then why don't the publishers just have a page count that isn't misleading and let the buyer decide if it's worth their money or not?

Because that's highly complex, would confuse most people and result in price differences that are mostly quite minor. VERY few books are either 200 pages or 1000. Most seem to land between 300 and 500 or so.

I think the reason they don't do this is because they'd lose sales.

And because it's a silly idea. Should a 500 page book be almost 2x the price of the 300 page book? What about a 346 page book? QUick, where are the breakpoints, how do you justify those and not others and how do you clearly communicate the reasoning?

Believe it or not for many people even buying a book is an extravagance because they're broke. If you could only buy one book to read for the next month how upset would you be that you blasted right through it because it had an artificially inflated page count?

Having been broke at different points in my life I 1) hit up used bookstores, 2) the library, 3) bought carefully if something was new. I wasn't so naif as to think that the length of a book was important. Author? YEs, if it was book by an author whose work I really liked, I'd buy it regardless of length. Today, you even have more sources of cheap books - there are routinely sales for various books (see the thread elsewhere here, signup for Bookbub, signup for the GR Deals email). Self-published books are also pretty inexpensive. Public domain books are free. Are these high quality? No idea, but since you seem to value words/dollar, does it matter?

Also, I keep seeing this "long books have filler" argument but that's frequently not the case. There are plenty of legitimately long books that are excellent. On the flip side there are plenty of short books that are filler/trash so please stop using this argument.

Don't tell any of us what arguments we can and cannot use. Also, learn the difference between assertions and arguments. And between generalizations and exceptions. Are there some very long series that are mostly excellent? Sure. Are there a lot of them that have hundreds of pages of filler? Absolutely (and fantasy rewards long series especially). Are some short books good, while others are bad? Yep.

All of this SHOULD tell you that quality and hence enjoyment isn't tied to length yet somehow this blatantly obvious point has sailed right over your head.

What I kept seeing asserted was that all door stopper books had filler, which is just untrue. Yes, some have filler and some don't and that's what I'm saying. But it's pure BS to say that they all are filler.

You also don't seem to understand that I understand that quality matters but a short book of equal quality to a long book shouldn't cost as much. You're getting more enjoyment out of the long book because it's also good but you're getting more time of that enjoyment. Don't tell me you've never read a short book and wished that it could just keep going.