WSJ: Short Is Good: The concise joys of condensed books — and the virtues of brevity. New condensed books by Orion Books may make reading condensed books respectable. Terry Teachout adds
that reading Reader’s Digest condensed books as a child, led him to read longer versions of the books, in some cases.
Like Orion’s Compact Editions, Condensed Books came in for a fair
amount of teasing. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, for instance, wrote a
very funny song in which they speculated on how the Digest’s editors
might have summed up “Gone With the Wind”: “Scarlett O’Hara’s a spoiled
pet/She wants everything that she can get/The one thing she can’t get
is Rhett/The end.”