Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

penguin.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#11

Post by rvba »

jb1991 wrote: post #9

The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in…

There are much more things to consume. There were of course books and newspapers in the past (in fact even more press and higher quality than now), but I think for average person there was much less of everything - you had one book, one newspaper, few tv channels to choose from.

So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the people who write them must pump few per day

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#12

Post by passion__desire »

jll29 wrote: post #10

I was hoping for some statistics about avg. (mean, mode) chapter length, and changes over time, given that this post comes from Penguin, who have plenty of data at their fingertips. Still, an interesting blog post.

Humanities department generally / traditionally haven't believed in insights that come from mathematics.

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#14

Post by captn3m0 »

Conscat wrote: post #6

Slightly tangential, the longest single chapter of anything I've read so far is Fallout: Equestria chapter 37, at 51.5k words. Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons is the longest single novel, at 1.8m words, but in terms of chapter count (which seems to be what the article means by "length"), I doubt either of those come close, since they merely have 50-odd chapters. Counting the number of chapters seems like a stra…

A Memory of Light (last book in Wheel of Time) has a single chapter at 79000 words. Quote from the author about the chapter:

> The chapter is just shy of 79,000 words. It contains (by my quick count) 72 scenes–but only 31 distinct viewpoints, as numerous ones repeat.

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#16

Post by lumb63 »

jb1991 wrote: post #9

The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in…

I worry about the same thing. I will say, however, that I worry more about this in the context of news articles, conversation, and other shorter-duration activities. Books are a big commitment, and it is highly disappointing to find out someone stretched a 50 page book into 250 pages to get it published. Sometimes it helps to instill the idea, or provides useful elaboration, but sometimes it is filler with no discernible benefit to the reader. Our time is important and as such, I think there ought to be a referendum against wasting it. That is not to say all content should be short, but that it should be no longer than it needs to be, and that information density should be as high as is tolerable.

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#17

Post by persnickety »

jll29 wrote: post #10

I was hoping for some statistics about avg. (mean, mode) chapter length, and changes over time, given that this post comes from Penguin, who have plenty of data at their fingertips. Still, an interesting blog post.

Ironic that they prefer to tell us stories rather than show the facts.

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#19

Post by keiferski »

passion__desire wrote: post #12
jll29 wrote: post #10

I was hoping for some statistics about avg. (mean, mode) chapter length, and changes over time, given that this post comes from Penguin, who have plenty of data at their fingertips. Still, an interesting blog post.

Humanities department generally / traditionally haven't believed in insights that come from mathematics.

Depends on what you mean by traditionally. This division is largely a consequence of the battle between scientific-technical education and classics/Latin-Greek education in the 19th century. Prior to that, there was definitely a ton of overlap between humanities and mathematics - consider Leibniz as a prime example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#20

Post by jb1991 »

rvba wrote: post #11
jb1991 wrote: post #9

The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in…

There are much more things to consume. There were of course books and newspapers in the past (in fact even more press and higher quality than now), but I think for average person there was much less of everything - you had one book, one newspaper, few tv channels to choose from. So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the people who write…

That's an interesting observation -- perhaps the proliferation of quantity is encouraging audiences to care less about engagement time so they can maximize exploration of all that is available.

The ability to speed up the playback speed of Netflix content would be an example of this.

Post reply on HN