This is a huge reason I preferred to self-publish. I have a math book that is 12-chapters (~90 pages total), written in a compact, friendly style I prefer. There are too many incentives to pad out your writing when you are trying to fill physical shelf space ("look impressive" vs "be useful"). Instead of a page count, how about an idea count?

(I get the occasional feedback that people wish that the book was longer, they want more topics, but never any individual chapter being longer...)

It's harder to tell how long an ebook is than a paper book and harder to know where you are in it from the feeling of how many pages are gripped in each hand. This is a downside of ebooks for me--harder to get an automatic sense of the geography of the book, where I am in it, where interesting things I read were located, where to flip to in order to check something.

But I think there's a silver lining to the length being so hard to see. I suspect it will lead to more authors tailoring their book length to how best to express the content rather than to the market expectations of the physical size of a "book".

Yep, exactly. I prefer print for books I intend to refer to often. (I use createspace to turn the ebook to print on demand. With Softcover & LaTeX, you can get print-quality PDFs, best of both worlds.)

Focusing on the ebook version first helps you keep the content to the right (best-fitting) length.

What book? I'm on the lookout for a good math book.

Kalid has a whole pile of good stuff at:

https://betterexplained.com/

Thanks Jacques :)

Math, Better Explained

https://www.amazon.com/Math-Better-Explained-Unlock-Intuitio...

Check out a few articles on https://betterexplained.com/cheatsheet and see if they fit your style.

Oh Kalid it's you! I haven't bought your book (and I'll remediate to that right now), but I've followed all your posts, they're fantastic.

Go buy this guy's book :)

Thanks Jerome =).

Thanks!

Just to throw in a plug:

'The Pleasures of Counting' is one of the best math books you can get your hands on.

Our company was contacted by a few publishers about writing a book on our industry, but they all wanted ridiculous page counts that were impossible to fill (with anything that most people could actually read and understand anyway).

I get the marketing/value angle but it prevents lot of good material that would otherwise be written or written well.

This is especially true when you are reading management books. I always look for some papers from the author on the same topic and substitute them for the books. I wish there is world out there that can reward short form books both fiction and non fiction.

Well if I have a choice in book selection, I usually do a few quick skims trough some random parts to see which ones explain things best. So overly verbose books would get less preference here.