Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was actually a summary of the much larger work he had been writing on for years, when someone else (Alfred Russel Wallace) wrote him a letter about the same idea of natural selection. This forced him to forge ahead and he wrote his 500-page ‘summary’ in just over a year, which was then published in November 1859.
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Darwin had a tendency to dither, and evolution was a very controversial topic in the mid-19th century when the vast majority in Britain believed in divine creation, so he wanted to present all the evidence he could bring to bear from his travels, his experiments and the work of others. Scholars have a tendency to do that, but in the days of printed books, publishers stepped in to scale the volumes down to something they could sell. On the other hand, textbook publishers often wanted new editions of popular textbooks to be bulked up to justify a more expensive new edition. (My Understanding Fiber Optics bulked up from 280 pages in the first edition in 1988 to 800 pages in the 2006 fifth edition.)
That came much later (or at least “what they could sell” was much longer in the 19th century). In Darwin’s time, without TV, radio, Internet, etc, lengthy books were prized entertainment. The books of Charles Dickens were massive. Word count for his top-10:
- David Copperfield: 357,489
- Dombey and Son: 357,484
- Bleak House: 355,936
- Little Dorrit: 339,870
- Martin Chuzzlewit: 338,077
- Our Mutual Friend: 327,727
- Nicholas Nickleby: 323,722
- The Pickwick Papers: 302,190
- Barnaby Rudge: 255,229
- The Old Curiosity Shop: 218,538
At about 90k words / 300 pages, most of those are around 1000 pages each.
Anthony Trollope wrote similarly long works.
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My experience with the anti-summary was with the first edition of my Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, which the publisher wanted to bulk up so it was thicker and thus competed better on the shelves next to other books. We added lists of Usenet newsgroups in an appendix. 
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Of course Dickens’ ’novels’ were serialized and he was paid based on length so both his and his publisher’s motivations were to string readers along.
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Which is the opposite of publishers asking their authors to scale things down.
(And Trollope’s novels were not serialized)
Wow. Look at all those words!
It wasn’t just England. In France Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Balzac, et.al. all produced (delightful) monster books. And then there’s Proust. . . . It’s my impression it was the same in the rest of the continent.
Also, when I was at Contemporary Books in the mid-eighties, first as a typesetter then editor, we all noticed that manuscripts seemed to be getting strikingly larger. The answer, of course, was word processors on personal computers. 
Dave
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Looking back at Adam’s concluding summary, he makes the crucial point that all summaries do not do the same thing and will not serve all people I have seen upper-level physics textbooks that open with Maxwell’s equations because the author thinks of them as an elegant summary of electromagnetic physics. So it may be to a professor, but what a first-year student needs a much longer explanation of what the equations mean both mathematically and physically.
All we can realistically expect from AI is a list of names and subjects mentioned, which can be helpful if you’re trying to find information on specific people, things or topics, but won’t help you understand the subject if you don’t already know something about it.
If it wasn’t for the “Internet Starter Kit”, my husband and I would probably never been able to get online. In my humble opinion, at the time it was the digital equivalent of Gutenberg’s movable type and printing press.
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Couldn’t agree more. It’s my device and I have the settings for it. It shouldn’t be up to the developer what happens after they send the notification to me.
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Excellent article Adam. Thought provoking for this guy. Thanks.
PS Now provide a speed reading silver bullet for those of us in need. ;) LOL
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Looks like Apple is tweaking the notifications summaries a bit.
Great article. I had to login to say so. My first experience with anti-summarization was in High School English class when the teacher said my paper wasn’t long enough. My first experience with the idea of summarization was the scene in A River Runs Through It when the dad keeps telling the son to write his article half as long. I thought, “people value that?”