My experience in political science is that what will often happen is that an academic will get a paper published in a major journal. Then it becomes easy to sell a book to a publisher in which you just present the results of that paper and add a bunch of useless words. Something like this is the norm, not the exception. From talking to economists, I gather that they’re pretty negative on books, and this is one of the many ways they’re more sensible than other academics.
The issue here is opportunity cost. Let’s say you want to learn about why people form the political opinions they hold. You might read a 300-page book. Or, for the same amount of time and effort, you might read two chapters of that book that are 20 pages each, plus 15 different articles that are 15 pages each, plus say 5 Wikipedia articles that are the equivalent of another 35 pages. Something like the latter is usually the better path. And most academic articles are, to be frank, full of filler too, so you’re probably better off skipping the intro and conclusion of many of them. Substacks and Tweets are actually efficient methods of transferring information because you cut out so much of the useless fluff people include when they’re trying to build a CV.
It’s not that nothing can be learned from reading the 300-page book. It’s just that reading the book is a large commitment, and puts you at the mercy of one author, who probably took way too long to make his points for reasons of ego and career interest.
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