I've been told that business books are 7 pages of content, and 242 pages of story so to get people to read the content pages.
Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't some made up BS as supported by real customer experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably lack the story to make it stick.
There is actually an 18 page summary of Crossing the Chasm in my local Amazon store - it gets 2 star ratings.
I think that there are some potentially conflicting forces:
- a short exposition is probably better for the reader
- less than 200 pages is seen as poor value for money
- people generally expect to read from start to finish
For me I'd much prefer books which fail the read from start to finish test but have clearly signposted sections that I can choose to read and sample from.
I think by the time you took your scalpel to a typical business book, you might be left with 50-100 pages. The core idea is probably a magazine article but there are usually useful examples, context, etc.
The problem is that publishing industry economics demand something more like 250 to 300 pages (and truth be told a lot of readers would feel a bit ripped off if they paid a typical book price for a 75 page book).