Part of the reason behind Squeezed Books (which I recently sold on) was to 'deflate' books like that. Why buy something that's just a fad and can be summed up in a page or two.
For some reason Squeezed Books sounds like a more modern version of Readers Digest. What could possibly be lost by reducing 'War and Peace' to a 20 page summary?
I think some authors would prefer to get away from it, but the publishing market, even though it's slowly moving in that direction, isn't quite there yet. If you're shopping around a solid 75-page piece, it's too long for a magazine (or even most journals, if it's research), yet too short for a book. So you either chop it or pad it, usually.
A good compromise, I'd think, would be to divide the piece into modular components with a repetitive (or narrative) structure, and publish them serially as a sort of "miniseries" feature in a magazine. This is how many pieces of novella-length genre fiction were originally published, for instance.
Squeezed Books is only for business books, which are inflated in the first place in many cases: they could be restated in a few pages if you take out all the case studies and repetition of the Key Points and so on and so forth. Even if it's a novel, good idea, you can't sell a 10 page book, so they have to add enough stuffing until it's big enough to sell as a book.
They should have some sort of equivalent App Store for ideas. YOu pay 5$ and a file is downloaded to your computer. You open it up and it says "Have a list of stuff to do, review it daily in the morning, act on it during the day. Be organized."
The big issue is that speaking tours would be pretty much out of the question.
In economics, ideas are an interesting category of product. They're fairly difficult to exclude people from - you can't "sell" an idea to 1000 people and not expect to see it spread, if it's good.
They're often quite non-rivalrous, too, although the right one at the right time might mean that one person gets the most benefit from it.
