And, of course, my point was simply that each idea has a natural length. If your books are indeed the result of “thirteen years of heroically intense inner concen­tration”, your output may be just be terse, relatively speaking.

EDWARD N. HAAS D.O.B. 04/13/1936
39193 HAAS ROAD – HAASWOOD
PEARL RIVER, LA 70452

I mean ahem.

Sexual selection, yes…Gobble..Gobble..

I must say: They treat us better at The Economist.

I must contemplate this entire notion of tweeting a narrative….
(I suddenly feel old, very old)

Good, though not brief summary of most prominent recent reincarnation – Millers Mating Mind Theory is at
http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?12.008

PS – clearly the Economist is one of the other peaks of the journalistic status heirarchy. And we are blessed to be able to interact with one if its successful conquerors.

Includes – following quote.
I was paid $7,750 for “Jake Leg,” which ran 5,000 words. Dollars-per-word isn’t a very good measure of pay. Because writing short can take more work than writing long, but either way, this was good pay but not terrific. At the time, I was writing just about full time for Rolling Stone, which was paying me $3.40 a word.

Your comment about business books dovetails with what I’ve said before:
“….But non-fiction books do tend to contain a fifty-page idea that the author must stretch out to 300 pages just to please the publisher, leaving lots of books with 250 unread pages on most people’s shelves, as Seth Godin, an author and blogger, told me in my article on the subject. Good fiction does not face that problem, because it tells stories, and human beings love good stories….”

I agree that digital distribution will lead to a surprising kind of honesty in the length of media content.

“Hard to be both” is a good meme, with potential, btw….

Another pet peeve of mine: business books, which could almost always be reduced to a three-page magazine article without sacrificing any useful information. But you can’t charge $19.99 for a magazine article, so these books are padded with another 247 pages of repetitive filler. I usually read 30-50 pages and then put them back on the shelf.

I’m also reminded of a blog post by Chris Anderson (http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/05/natural_portion.html) arguing that 30-minute TV shows are an anachronism doomed to vanish in the age of digital distribution. Single track sales on iTunes are another example of this phenomenon, as is the inevitable debundling of newspapers.

All this to say that I heartily agree with your thesis that most content nowadays is too long, usually for reasons that no longer make any sense. I’m confident, however, that digital distribution will blow apart our preconceptions about how long content should be. In particular, the artificial correlation of length and price will die a well-deserved death. Time is money, more than ever in the age of information overload, and I’d personally pay more to get shorter content, provided it is of high quality.

8-hour Economist podcast: scandalously long. Surprised you made it.

P.S. – 8 hours to listen to weekly Economist audio.
Despite brevity.

P.P.S. – original meaning of sarcasm = flesh cutting.

I do think that Americans overwrite more than the Brits, but it’s an individual thing. I know plenty of great American authors who get it just right.

Shorter paragraphs: I think it’s part of the general shortening in the online culture. Everything needs to become more digestible, thus shorter. Not an altogether bad trend, in the right hands…

You were using irony in saying “is”, not “are”, no?

I think American journalists overwrite more than do their English counterparts. How say you?

Given that paragraphs today are much shorter than in the days of yore, what think you of today’s short paragraphs? What thinks the Economist?