Consonant Dude said it best. I like the smaller books for core rules. Give me clear, concise rules that are as portable and inexpensive as possible and I'm a happy guy.

A game should be just long enough to establish its rules and setting/premise. Any more than that is filler, anything less is crippleware.

I think age is a factor here. My capacity to absorb a lot of text has diminished somewhat and my desire to do so greatly. Furthermore, and this applies more to setting material, I much prefer evocative descriptions that are sparkplugs for my own imagination rather than exhaustive encyclopedias of data. Jeff Mejia's Legends of Steel and Kenneth Hite's Day After Ragnarok are excellent examples of a successful implementation of this principle.

Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition is a great example of a rules text that never repeats itself, is exhaustive and short. The only problem that can arise is that sometimes people don't realize that a single in a paragraph is the rule, as it may be a slight tangent in a paragraph on a bigger rule or they have a tendency to expect each rule to be reinforced with multiple references.

It's not the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean.

Seriously though, content wins over fluff every single time in my book. If the content is spot on, then the size of the book shouldn't matter. At least, it doesn't to me personally.

I like rules to be clear and concise. I also prefer them to be stated once, but then I've seen a lot of complaints about people missing certain rules, even rules that seemed clearly outlined to me, so repetition seems to be one of those personal preferences.

It also depends on the type of game. With a historical game, I'd want a ton of info on the time period, cultures, moods, etc. A modern game would need a lot less. A sci-fi game a lot more. A superheroes game would need clear rules for powers, but I could wing a setting with no problem.

I'm one of the minorities in that I really like game fiction, even godawful game fiction. I think it really helps sets the tone of the game. I remember the opening short story for Shadowrun 2E wasn't a great piece of fiction, but it did a great job of setting the mood of the game, introducing you to the concepts, and the slang.

I've realized though that not everyone has the desire to read fiction, so I've tried to limit how much I include in my games. With Stormrift, for example, I'm trying something a bit different, offering little one to two paragraph vignettes in the form of eyewitness accounts and news reports from different people, giving different takes on the course of the invasion. There's also a progression to the placement of the excerpts, so that if you read them straight through, they establish a sort of timeline on how the war has unfolded. It'll be interesting to see how (if?) people like it.

Pete

To me that's where stuff like a ToC, index, possibly a GM screen and numerous examples that are preferably clearly marked (like boxed text of a certain color) should come to the rescue.

He he. Check the editor credit on LoS!

I enjoy large, comprehensive setting books, but I find that the length of many game books these days is artificially bloated. Huge margins, tons of flavour text, and evocative writing that unfortunately also happens to be meaningless and useless for gaming increase pages counts drastically without adding much value to the book.