Who are IPO prospectuses really written for?

Oravel Stays, now known as PRISM, the parent company of OYO, filed its IPO papers last week. At 1,148 pages, it is a mountain of a document. To give you some context, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s panoramic epic, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy run into around 1,200 pages each. The Dodd-Frank Act, which restructured the global financial system after the 2008 crash, is around 850 pages. 

Essentially, PRISM’s bankers and lawyers required more paper to take a hospitality company public than the US Congress needed to regulate Wall Street.

I opened the draft red herring prospectus and then continued with work, promising myself I would return. I haven’t. It sits as the 13th tab on my browser, and I am in a dilemma. I can neither close it, nor can I bring myself to open it and read.