It's the app store equivalent of the "big box" VHS craze in the mid-late 80s. Video stores had precious shelf space and wanted to cram as many titles face forward so customers can marvel in the variety. To make themselves unique, dubious movie houses made their box art more elaborate: Larger (often twice the size of the tape it held) and more "artistic" (textures, reflective surfaces, holograms, blatantly explicit or exploitative covers, eye-popping colors etc.).
I have a theory that computer book companies do their toned-down version of that as well: Horrifically large and heavy books with large font sizes and images inserted apropos of nothing. Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all). They are either large in size or so thick that if displayed spine-first, they still take up a honking amount of shelf space.
The Ben Bodyguard site is the big box/book phase of the app store: Visibility at all costs = Sales (no matter how fleeting).
Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all).
Undergraduate textbooks, too. There's no reason why a first-year physics textbook should be a thousand pages long; the same information presented sensibly could fit in two hundred, maybe one hundred. But it sure does look impressive to the committee in charge of choosing the textbook (and they never have to carry it around or see the pricetag).
On my "to do" list is to write the 150-page freshman physics textbook. (But of course if it existed we could only charge twenty bucks for it, whereas if I threw in five hundred pages of unnecessary pictures and repetition I could quintuple my commission...)
When I was in first year I went through my father's old university physics textbook and compared it to mine (we both studied engineering). His was a quarter of the physical area of mine, but covered essentially all the same topics. The writing of his was terse, clear and compact, whereas mine was generally verbose and meandering (though this is of course a subjective analysis). As far as I can tell in the 30 odd years between our university experiences the quality of textbooks has seriously declined.
One thing that _why mentioned a few times is that textbooks should really be more like 80 pages, max. We don't need index sections or setup directions, those just get out of date quickly... present the information at a reasonably high level, then get out.
Not keywords, but often books will come with what's basically `man foo | lpr`. A big old reference section that'll just be bad with the next point release.
Of course, that means there needs to be an updated version of the book...
Tech books often come with a section in the back that basically just reprints the manual that comes with the software. It's not as bad today as it once was, but you'd often see these big huge books that were essentially 1/3 API reference. Publishers love to do this because it forces new editions to be made with new revisions of the software.
> Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content
I'm not sure I'd be inclined to put both series into the same category. Admittedly I haven't looked at the recent Head First publications and I'm not their target audience but from reading some of the theory behind the style on http://headrush.typepad.com/ (of "Creating Passionate Users" fame) the original motivation was definitely to communicate effectively.
But either way, I suspect most non-technical people learn technical things in a very different way to technical people.
I have a theory that computer book companies do their toned-down version of that as well: Horrifically large and heavy books with large font sizes and images inserted apropos of nothing. Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all). They are either large in size or so thick that if displayed spine-first, they still take up a honking amount of shelf space.
The Ben Bodyguard site is the big box/book phase of the app store: Visibility at all costs = Sales (no matter how fleeting).