Trilogies: Just say No!

I wish I had the drive to start a new campaign: STOP THE TRILOGIES!

I know that trilogies, or simply put, multi-book deals are good for the writers financially, readers tend to buy all of the series usually since they don't like to stop at the middle of a book and printers just love it for the same reason.

On the other hand, I've had enough! I can't go to Borders and pick a random SF/F book anymore. Almost any other book is a part of a series and it only is the fourth book of an eight book series! Heellooo? Why should I pick this book and walk away with it?


Unless it is a manga - then it's the opposite. I buy my mangas from Amazon. Why? Because the bookshops in my City have a stupid rule, they only have the first couple of volumes of any manga so I always get my first hit from them and then get the rest of the volumes supplied by Amazon. Surely the bookshop is losing money here, a typical Manga series is usually 13 to 20 volumes. Selling only a small fraction is useless.

Back to the books again.

Obviously emotional attachment to the characters is a strong reason for buying serial books. Writers can flesh out the characters significantly compared to the shorter books. On the other hand, are we readers getting our money's worth? In my experience a story that should have been finished in a medium-thickness volume usually gets expanded into a trilogy. The events get sparser, with lots of "character development" in between. On the other hand these character developments don't give us any more insight to the story itself - we tend to fed up all sorts of stupid stories about the character's life. For example a character might be a cynical person. In a shorter book, this can be described as such and be done with. In a trilogy, we would learn about his failed marriage, his cheating wife, sweet but now dead kids and his folding business, not because of his fault either but his partner, who also was fucking our character's sister AND wife, make our character cynical. And this takes an additional 100 pages to go through... Thinking that most of 50s and 60s novels were about 120-180 pages long...

Let's all say NO to the trilogies.
Let's get the writers concentrate on the story again.
Let's be able to finish a book in a peaceful evening and then contemplate over it for a couple of hours.

This will mean that we will have to buy more books. We will be reading more of them and we will be introduced to more interesting ideas for the same page count.
I can't see any problem there!