I love nonfiction books that are under 100 pages. You can dive deep into a topic without adding a lot of fluff.
I’ve downloaded over 2M books and reviews from Goodreads. What I’ve found is that less than 5% of nonfiction books published are under 100 pages.
However, as you can see in this chart I created with [Graphext](http://graphext.com), they tend to be much more popular than the most commonly published ones—those that are around 300 pages.
It’s true that really, really long books also get great reviews, but I imagine the folks who get to write books that long must be truly exceptional authors.
Is that median rating and standard deviation? People sure rate books high. The median being 4/5, with such low deviation, really lowers the amount of information of those ratings.
Looks to me like the rating of 50 page books is not different to most or all of the others by a statistically significant amount. The evidence is not sufficient to reject the null hypothesis and support the statement in your title.
Skewed by volume of published books and reader reviews I’d think. A “typical” book is around 300pg and naturally not everyone will like each one though they may still finish reading. But if only a few 800pg books are published, and only a few people bothered to read them, selection bias points to higher ratings.
That spike at 750 pages is just people proud they finally made is through Gravity’s Rainbow
That’s a 2-4% diff. Negligible.
Isn’t all of those data very “same-ish”
three hundred page books are only rated lower because they’re more published. if the bar were lower to getting published at fifty pages, you’d see lower average reviews.
I’ve lost count of the number of non-fiction books that are really interesting 20 page academic essays or journal submissions that are fluffed out to 350+ pages. I’m sick of them. So many times I read a book and think “ This could have been a 20-50 page essay”
I was reading a non-fiction book about neuroscience and morality the other day and the author set it up beautifully in the first 10 pages. Then he went back 5000 years and there was 200 pages of mind numbing rambling bullshit history.
![[OC] 50 pages non-fiction books are great!](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/xge273eh50ee1-1920x1024.png)
9 comments
I love nonfiction books that are under 100 pages. You can dive deep into a topic without adding a lot of fluff.
I’ve downloaded over 2M books and reviews from Goodreads. What I’ve found is that less than 5% of nonfiction books published are under 100 pages.
However, as you can see in this chart I created with [Graphext](http://graphext.com), they tend to be much more popular than the most commonly published ones—those that are around 300 pages.
It’s true that really, really long books also get great reviews, but I imagine the folks who get to write books that long must be truly exceptional authors.
Here is [the code](https://github.com/victoriano/goodreads_dataset) to download the data, transform it to upload it to Graphext.
Is that median rating and standard deviation? People sure rate books high. The median being 4/5, with such low deviation, really lowers the amount of information of those ratings.
Looks to me like the rating of 50 page books is not different to most or all of the others by a statistically significant amount. The evidence is not sufficient to reject the null hypothesis and support the statement in your title.
Skewed by volume of published books and reader reviews I’d think. A “typical” book is around 300pg and naturally not everyone will like each one though they may still finish reading. But if only a few 800pg books are published, and only a few people bothered to read them, selection bias points to higher ratings.
That spike at 750 pages is just people proud they finally made is through Gravity’s Rainbow
That’s a 2-4% diff. Negligible.
Isn’t all of those data very “same-ish”
three hundred page books are only rated lower because they’re more published. if the bar were lower to getting published at fifty pages, you’d see lower average reviews.
I’ve lost count of the number of non-fiction books that are really interesting 20 page academic essays or journal submissions that are fluffed out to 350+ pages. I’m sick of them. So many times I read a book and think “ This could have been a 20-50 page essay”
I was reading a non-fiction book about neuroscience and morality the other day and the author set it up beautifully in the first 10 pages. Then he went back 5000 years and there was 200 pages of mind numbing rambling bullshit history.
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