Good God, Holmes...

I thought these would be the size of trade paperbacks, maybe a bit larger. These are more in the vein of doorstops.

Comparison with a normal paperback. There's a more expensive version of the books that comes with a slipcase which would have been nice but about 800rs more for a slipcase seems too much for frou-frous.

Aha here's the secret. Lots of empty space. It looks like they've left a fixed amount of space per page for the annotations and where there aren't any, I guess you get to make your own.