Non-Fiction Has Bad Incentives
Article of Interest: Non-Fiction Has Bad Incentives
Thoughts:
The number one reason I don't finish a book is because it feels like it should have been an article, but instead it gets stretched out over 200 pages (when it only ever needed to be about ten). That's why when I published my book, I wanted to avoid this by making it less like one core theory and more of an examination; a collection of theories that appear to me in retrospect to be more like a collection of 12 related essays than just one essay that got drawn out over however many pages.
I don't fully agree with the whole "writing a book is just a way to gain status" though -- it's awfully hard to do that much work for something you're not genuinely interested in. At some point, you ache to share it with others. Sometimes thats in an essay, sometimes (albeit more often than perhaps it should be) it's in a book.
Zevulous