Reader beware of these ripoffs.

I've discovered to my dismay lately that many writers are not interested in telling a good story for the sake of telling it, they feel to me like they are interested in telling a story in installment or neverendingstory formats, both of which seem like nothing more than a money-making proposition to me. 

The first example is the installment story.  You pay for your "book" and download it to your reader, only to find it's not even novella length, and that what should constitute a single book has been broken up into a "series" of three or more installments, wherein the author wants you to pay as much as you would for a single novel for every tiny segment of their book.  I've abandoned some good storylines and left negative reviews for authors who use this ploy on me.  I'm not cheap, but I do expect value for my money spent, and if I'm paying for a book, I want a book, not something I can read in less than an hour and which leaves many major plot points unresolved.  I've got nothing against cliff-hanger stories, but I prefer that a writer is up front that they want to tell you their story only a little bit at a time. 

The opposite end of the spectrum  is the neverendingstory.  I've seen some series that are beyond epic and into the realm of ridiculously long, where a single storyline that can and should be told in one to three books is drawn out over nine books or more with never a coherent stopping point seen.  IMO, it's nothing more than another rip-off, designed to get the reader to continually shell out more money in hopes of getting a resolution to plot points somewhere along the line.  I feel if your series is set in a coherent universe that ends up being popular with readers, then you can tell more stories in the same setting rather than dragging out a single plot line over multiple novels that have a lot of useless filler in them.  Granted, I can be wordy (The Tourney is a whopping 125,860 words long as of the latest version), but I can't see telling the same story over nine or more books. 

So my advice for today is that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, then act like a serious writer and publish novel length books, especially when you use the word "book" in your title, and also you should make it clear if you're dragging out the main plot line over more than three books so that readers who do not like these formats can look elsewhere for entertainment.