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LM: #376: Books have been written to be sold, not read
I don’t know if it’s more remarkable that book sales are down lately, or that they stayed as high as they were for as long as they were.
Tim Ferriss recently reported an 80% decrease in book sales, and cited an industry report that self-help sales were down 26%.
Ferriss thinks people are using AI as a replacement for “prescriptive nonfiction.” I think there’s also an overall cultural malaise around ambition.
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But I also see an exciting opportunity in the drop in book sales.
Because it seems obvious that self-help and business books for the past decade or so have been written to be sold, not read.
They’ve been entire books about one compelling idea – mostly summarized by the sticky title – stretched out for 250 pages. The text has been broken up by a subhead every 200 words, and littered with one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences. There have been diagrams every other page. Concepts have been broken up into bullet-points, the flow of text interrupted by sidebars, each chapter ending with “key takeaways.”
I personally hate this kind of “book.” I don’t know that I have in the past ten years once finished reading a book in this category, aside from the rare ones absent these features. Subtle Art and Four Thousand Weeks come to mind.
But that is what you get when the book industry responds to a market of readers who don’t actually like to read. James Clear has said he only expects people will read the first fourteen pages, so that’s where he concentrated value in Atomic Habits.
I like to read books. I enjoy prose. I do not enjoy sifting through a stew of bite-sized ideas that aren’t tightly integrated with one another to build support for a meaty central thesis.
Info-snacking is what social media is for (and now also what AI is for). If the concepts can be summarized in a series of bullet-points, it does not deserve to be a book.
So as more people get answers through LLMs, fewer books will be sold. But as someone who actually likes to read books, I’m optimistic about what happens when books are no longer bought by people who don’t have the attention span for reading actual books.
Maybe books can be written not to be sold, but read.
Aphorism: “Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, Oh, please don’t. Please don’t try to help me.” —Liz Gilbert
Cool: Tim Ferriss on Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?
Best,
David
P.S. Thank you to Kate Volman for having me on the Create for no Reason podcast.
