E-books That Eliminate Padding

Some books are just too long. I am a slow reader and so not unbiased on the matter, but I can't help thinking that most nonfiction monographs published today should have been longish magazine essays. Suppose an author has a brilliant insight or original story that he can relate in 20,000 words (that's about half the length of "The Great Gatsby"). He has two equally unhappy choices. He can double or triple his word count with a lot of superfluous reflection and argument, aiming to land a book with a major publisher; or he can cut his 20,000 words down to 10,000 and hope the New Yorker accepts it. The Internet, of course, has freed writers from the arbitrary demands of print publishing: A Web article can be as long or short as its author wishes. But as a reader, I find anything beyond a few thousand words to be burdensome on a computer screen.