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E-book popularity could turn War and Peace into subway reading

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.