I just created a Custom Google Search for book outlines:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=005101733046013339255:wzkwvxcrud8

It only includes the two sites that you recommended, for now. Feel free to add new ones as you find them.

So there is a lot of personal history, case history, and cheerleading wrapped around the basic information the book wishes to convey. Sometimes this ancillary matter helps, sometimes it’s just dead weight.

There must be something of a cottage industry in this regard, I remember something called Executive Summary or Executive Briefing, a newsletter affair that summarized all the business books for time-harried executives.

As they say, ‘you can’t copyright an idea.’

The move to ebooks ought to free publishers and writers from the whole paradigm that a ‘book’ must be a certain length to justify its price, the price being mandatory to cover fixed costs of transportation etc., as well as a marketing notion that a bigger books offers ‘more value for your dollar.’

After all, isn’t our time worth something, too?

The big exception in nonfiction to this trend is in history and politics (well, sometimes political books are contained in the few words of their titles!). A book about the events and decisions that led to the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, for example, or one about the roots of WW2, or FDR’s first days in office.