Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Well, penny dreadfuls were not books.
|
I'm guessing that you say they weren't books because they were very short. I'd counter that this was simply a facet of the delivery mechanism (much as some people will say that an ebook isn't really a book). The target audience were very poor, so the stories were split into small chunks, and each chunk was sold for a penny. The first penny dreadful came in 60 parts. If each part was eight pages, that's 480 pages in total.
Mysteries of London came in 624 parts and was almost 4.5 million words long.