After several years of stacking up books by my bedside, books that I never read beyond the first 150 pages, I went through a period when I would only buy books that were no more than 200 pages long (about the length of my attention span plus a few pages beyond that - on the theory that I couldn't possibly be so lazy as to put aside a book that I was almost finished with ). I would go to the bookstore and scan the shelves for thin books, preferably paperbacks that would fit inside my purse. Alas, my narrow set of interests ensured that this self-imposed restriction wouldn't last very long; after a few months, I usually left the book store empty-handed. Now I have a new stack of fat books that I've read through page 150 or so.

I'm relieved to know that I'm not the only person out there with this kind of attention deficit, that there are other people who find that many books are unnecessarily long. Why else would someone have come up with LazyLibrary, a web search tool that finds books on Amazon that are under 200 pages long? You might suspect that people who use this search site (which appears to sell books as an Amazon affiliate) tend to go there to look for non-fiction books on fairly dry topics; popular subjects are finance, investing, productivity, business, and . . . magic (huh?). But then you'll notice that among the popular search terms are "sex," "Harry Potter," and "Oscar Wilde." Interesting.

Via techspace, by way of bookofjoe.