With the growing onslaught of e-readers and e-books, will readers see a shift in the average length of new books? Might we see longer books, because publishers are no longer constrained by the costs and sheer weight of a War and Peace-sized tome? Or will there be a deluge of novellas by authors freed from the pressure of writing a book of a certain length?

On Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell speculates about how the e-book revolution might at least save non-fiction readers from convoluted non-fiction books that are much longer than necessary:

The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself¦ Books which are, for example, extended versions of articles written for The Atlantic, The Public Interest or what have you are especially likely to be over-long for their topic “ I don’t remember ever reading one of these books and feeling that I got substantial insights which were unavailable in the original article.

And while Farrell hopes the future will bring a world where people won’t feel obliged to pad out what are really essays to book length, one commenter points out that the opposite may also be beneficial: long books that can continuously hold the reader’s attention (she gives the example of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall) could be read right through without the apprehension of starting a book too heavy to carry with you on the subway:

I hadn’t seen the physical version before I read [Wolf Hall] on the Kindle, and it was so absorbing that I had no consciousness of how long it was ” the Kindle tells you that you are 48% through, but if you’ve achieved flow in the reading, and you don’t tend to keep a running tally of the hours you’ve spent reading, that doesn’t give you a concrete idea, unlike the position of your bookmark in a physical book.