The Age of the Short Novel?

2012 has been dubbed the year of the ebook. I don’t think that’s too far-fetch of an idea. But along with the conversion from print to e-reader comes the question of how long a fiction or nonfiction ebook should be. I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject, and I think we’ll be seeing more and more short works in the market.
I don’t want to get into the debate as to what we should consider a novel or novella. Like most things, I see these distinctions as fuzzy and arbitrary lines drawn along a steady slope to divide the range from 3-word short story to 5,000-page epic. So I’m avoiding the word novella all together and going with “short novel”.
As writing has gotten easier and easier—due to increased general education, advanced word processing programs (compared to stylus and scroll or even typewriter), and the public’s more and more ravenous thirst for stories—we’ve seen an increase in the average length of published works. From a writer’s point of view, I’ve never gotten this. Why write a 500,000 words epic, and get paid once for it, when you can break it into at least 5 parts, and get paid five times (not to mention 5 possible movie deals) ?
But there’s always been this prejudice against short books. When you hold a book in your hand and can see that it’s only 100-150 pages, you may glance at the author and ask, “Is this the whole thing? You call this a novel? You’re just BARELY a writer, huh?”
And then we have the “amateurs” that finish NaNoWriMo and fight to get their 50,000-word “masterpiece” published, wondering why they’re rejected by every publisher in the biz. The rest of us snicker, thinking, “what a beginner. He’ll learn—REAL books have to be thicker.
Enter the ebook. How long is an ebook? How can you tell? By how long it takes to download? By how much memory it takes up on your SD card? I bet most people don’t realize the length until they’re nearly finished reading the thing!
So, you’re a writer, and you’re afraid your 40,000-word action thriller will fail for being too short. You self publish, and you WANT to hear that it’s too short, because that would mean one or two of two things:

1. The reader actually read the book… to the end, in fact.
2. The reader is complaining because they LIKED THE BOOK!

If you don’t like something, you’re glad when it’s over. Like when my family went to see Go-Go Gadget II. We were happy the movie was barely over an hour. Really glad, since even my kid-brothers didn’t like it that much.
So, what do you think? Short books might make a comeback? I hope so!