the different font displayed below is coming straight from Bryan's tumblr. basically, a book is still a season from the viewers standpoint, as it still has the complete story arch and the first two Books have the same production and release schedule as a normal season (I don't know if Book 3 and 4 will follow that pattern, it's possible that they won't) it's simply that the studio considers them as seasons for some reason that doesn't quite make sense to me...while more Korra is indubitably awesome, I'm not sure I like the shorter Books, for one simple reason: character development, or rather lack of thereof. I accepted all of the new main characters when they were introduced because expecting them to have the same depth of personality right off the bat as the original Team Avatar would be insane. However, I was expecting development over time, which really seemed obvious seeing how well the original series did it. I did enjoy the tightly woven plot, however I'd point to Book 2 of Avatar as the epitome of having both character development and a tightly bound plot on a television series. The problem is the lack of breathing room. In an interview Bryke once justified the season length by comparing it to shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, however those programs have 48 minutes running time. There isn't enough room to show the characters when you're shoving all that plot in that amount of time. Legend of Korra needs. character. development. badly. I can't believe I'm even saying that.anyways, below lies Byran's post –Book 1 = 12 episodes–Book 2 = 14 episodes–Book 3 = 13 episodes–Book 4 = 13 episodes–TOTAL = 52 episodesInitially, Nickelodeon picked up Korra as a 12-episode miniseries. Their idea was to do 12-episode arcs that were more standalone than the original Avatar series. Mike and I were cool with this idea, as we had originally wanted the seasons to be 12 episodes long instead of 20, and creatively we liked the idea of doing tighter story arcs.The original plan was that if Nickelodeon wanted more episodes, they would order them 12 episodes at a time. But while we were in production on Book 1, Nickelodeon decided to change their season lengths from 20 episodes (like Avatar had) to the more standardized international length of 26 episodes. They liked how Book 1 was coming out and decided to round out the order to fit their new 26-episode mold, and we got a 14-episode pick-up, which became Book 2.Then, the network wanted even more Korra, so they picked up another order of 26 episodes. Mike and I wanted to stick with the shorter “books,” so creatively we are splitting the second order of 26 into Books 3 & 4, 13 episodes each.What makes this even more confusing is that the network considers each block of 26 episodes a “season,” which is another reason we try to stick to calling these Korra arcs “books.” So for the network’s purposes, Books 1 & 2 are Season 1, and Books 3 & 4 are Season 2.