That's a very good point - I've always felt it was a shame that in order for a thesis to be "publishable" you have to frame it in 300 to 500 pages. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is a great example. It's an awesome book, and anyone who's designing user-facing-anything should read it, but I think the story could have been told in about half as many words.
I felt this way about Thinking: Fast and Slow. One of my favorite books, but could have been half the length. At least they included the original white paper in the back.
No, I liked the book. My point is that there are other great ideas out there that we're not exposed to because they're 100 page ideas rather than 300 page ones. It's less of an issue as we go more digital and rely less on traditional publishing channels, but there's still a knee there right now.
I've thought this way about other books, and seen this thought expressed about The Checklist Manifesto ("it should have been a 20 page pamphlet"). But I feel that most of the length (say, at least 75% of the book's published length) is necessary and justified.
Not because the concept itself requires so many pages to understand, but because it takes several repeated high-profile examples of checklists making a big difference, before the feeling of "it's just a checklist, what's the big deal" - that a lot of people express upon hearing the idea first - is replaced with understanding and internalization.
