Ah yeah, I'm in biological sciences, mine are paper format but not actually published yet. But it makes it easier to publish them later as you just need to modify the formatting for the journal rather than do it from scratch. I've never thought about it being less work, it certainly feels like a lot of work hah. With science PhD's usually having word limits of 40-50,000 rather than other fields having 100,000 you're forced to keep it short and sweet but that's a tough job in itself hah.

Well depends of course if the manuscripts are already done or not ;) In the other format you have to write the manuscripts AND something for the traditional thesis, so I always considered it less work (of course still a lot of work).

I never heard of word limits. I don't think we have something like that. I also found it strange that they seem to have a minimum amount of words for master theses in the UK. Reminds me a bit of school. I think this is so much topic dependent....should be more about the content, but well, that's how it is :)