The first six of these compact editions — Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters — will be available in Australian bookstores in July. They are intended for trouble-free consumption by people with far better things to do than read the whole books.

Reflecting the paradoxical desire to be well-read and liberated from the perceived drudgery of actually reading, these editions perfectly encapsulate a culture obsessed with instant answers and quick fixes. It's a literary equivalent to The Biggest Loser. Question: Will there be an award for the book that has lost the most chapters? Charles Dickens, watch out! We all know how much verbosity you could lose. At 795 pages, my copy of the complete David Copperfield barely squeezes into its cover. Is reading an abbreviated novel better than not reading it at all? Orion's publisher Malcolm Edwards clearly thinks so. Edwards has admitted that his own staff had significant gaps in their literary reading. Orion's cut-back paperbacks are designed, he said, to help combat ignorance.

"We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones," he said. Of course, as 50 years of Reader's Digest condensed books have attested, maimed masterpieces are nothing new to publishing. My abridged version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was great fun, but it totally failed to prepare me for the full novel, which I was shocked to discover was a harrowing story intended for adults. Cutting back a novel changes the tone, the feel, the point of the narrative.

The notion that the classics are too lengthy to be read doesn't hold water when you consider all that brick-thick popular fiction crowding bookshop shelves. Surely the best-selling works of Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett and Jodi Picoult have established that stupidly long books have a massive fan base. I also wonder if people are really all that time poor. How many of us (even Clive James admits to this in a recent essay) can vanquish entire weekends eyeballing DVDs of TV shows like The West Wing or The Sopranos, complete with hours of supplementary material?

These days we expect our movies on DVD to feature longer cuts and hours of bonus features. Surrendering more and more of our time to elongated fictions is the done thing. But if a novel must be eviscerated for our enjoyment, why trust a publisher to be the butcher when you can wield that cleaver yourself, simply by skimming over bits you don't enjoy?

In Ten Novels and Their Authors, novelist W. Somerset Maugham famously argued that the wise reader will gain a lot from the useful art of skipping. For Maugham it was straightforward: you follow your interests on the page and skip, if you must, to keep the story moving. At least this way you're in charge of what you read, not some anonymous publishing flunky. But there is another path. Savouring a book like a fine wine can intensify the pleasure of reading. Of his own grand novel The Ambassadors, Henry James wrote that it should be taken very easily and gently: read five pages a day. For me, James' advice holds across the canon. Drawing out a meticulous work like, say, Moby Dick brings out the full charm and helps produce the narrative spell. The biggest surprise for me as a neophyte adult reader has been just how accessible the classics canon is. All postmodern theories of the novel aside, skilful storytelling establishes an irresistible seduction.

The idea of losing a single sentence from The Mill on the Floss, for instance, is anathema. It's one of the most exquisitely executed stories in any medium. Pruning it would be like taking to the Mona Lisa's background with scissors because it distracts from her smile. Orion's pledge to give us a great read in half the time panders to a simple fear of highbrow literature. A fear most probably passed on to us by generations of English teachers whose tedious tones put so many of us off Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot etc for life.

The chances are if you make the effort to read these sumptuous works, you'll relish them too much to want them to end. They're classics for a reason and the more you read, the more you'll come to view the idea of cutting them back as a little more than a banal marketing stunt. Chris Middendorp is a Melbourne writer.