BNET - Rather than carefully read every sentence, people reading online tend to scan sentences and paragraphs. They move quickly across the text, always in a rush to find the content they need. Web readers are very fact-oriented. They rarely read the Web for pleasure - they want to do business, to be educated, to find out something. In turn, they prefer to read content that gets to the point quickly.

People like reading short documents with links to more detailed information, which they will also read as they deem necessary. If a document is long and people really have no choice but to read it all, studies show a significant number of them will print it. In general, however, long documents on a Web site go unread. Link.