Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't some made up BS as supported by real customer experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably lack the story to make it stick.
There is actually an 18 page summary of Crossing the Chasm in my local Amazon store - it gets 2 star ratings.
I think that there are some potentially conflicting forces:
- a short exposition is probably better for the reader
- less than 200 pages is seen as poor value for money
- people generally expect to read from start to finish
For me I'd much prefer books which fail the read from start to finish test but have clearly signposted sections that I can choose to read and sample from.