Mass market non-fiction has bad incentives
36 comments
·February 11, 2025beezlebroxxxxxx
throwup238
> Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries.
Amen. The vast majority of the text that was printed in the first few hundred years of the printing press was garbage mass market paper backs just like these. We have entire bibliographies and printers for whom not a single work survived because it was all worthless. Instead of self help, the most popular categories were translations of the classic canon and King Arthur and Knights of the Roundtable fiction.
xxr
See also: music. I often hear people express how much better music in the past was than the music of today usually to compare Led Zeppelin to Ice Spice[0] or whatever. They don't take into account the survivorship bias that the music we collectively remember (often through the aid of curators/arbiters) is going to be the stuff that was at the right intersection of good enough (or at least relevant enough to modern tastes) and popular enough to persist in the cultural record: if you want to understand what the vast majority of popular music was like "back when music was good," go to any crusty old record store and look at the shelf underneath the main shelf with all the $0.25 records: total garbage, typically bland and completely stultifying to any passion. Much like the worthless print matter that never survived, this is the stuff that never even made it onto any digital record anywhere and probably even had the master tapes wiped once it was on wax.
[0]Typically the "contemporary" example used is going to be something already a little aged like Nicki Minaj or even Britney Spears or any of the Pearlman-era boy bands who all peaked 25 years ago. Here I use someone actually recent to evade accusations that I am as out-of-touch as the target of criticism here.
madcaptenor
The author explicitly says they're talking about this genre. From TFA: "By 'non-fiction' I mean mass-market non-fiction, those paperbacks with titles like 'Sleep: Why We Need It, And Why We Don’t Get Enough of It'. Textbooks and technical books are a separate category." I see at least three categories - mass-market, textbooks/technical, and your "higher echelon".
orwin
I think what you call "higher echelon" are just vulgarization books written by academics.
A fun example is in physics, the "Feynman" literature. Because of all the published stuff, you have only his lecture that are actually authored by him (and two co-authors, he was the speaker but by no mean the only expert involved). Lot of the books are just anaecdata or just people trying to remember discussion they had with him, and two are based on a biograph work, except he wasn't a biograph so in my country, he would probably have received pushback.
The only feynman book i would call "higher echelon" are his published public lectures. Even his biography i would consider an "airport book" (interestingly enough, i have found that book at an airport 10 years ago while visiting the western US). Still, his biography is a hundred time better than random slop written (and now probably AI-hallucinated) about him by people who met him once, and is still very interesting.
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thundergolfer
Not realizing this is a problem of media literacy. Many people below the median literacy level unfortunately think media literacy means merely understanding that the newspaper might be biased.
Higher levels of media literacy involve understanding exactly these dynamics described by the author and avoiding this bad kind of non-fiction, mass market non-fiction.
Another interesting dynamic in fiction writing is that fiction book prices do not scale linearly with page count, but costs kinda do, so authors are discouraged from writing 800 pages tomes like Middlemarch and War & Peace.
Insanity
Sounds more like the author just had bad experiences with non fiction? There are plenty of non fiction books which are good and where the book doesn’t just feel like filler. Some that come to mind quickly :
- bad blood (about theranos)
- SPQR
- King Leopold’s Ghost
- Lost in Math
- masters of doom
A_D_E_P_T
There's non-fiction (historical accounts and pop-sci explainers) and there's non-fiction (here's how you ought to behave.)
Obviously SPQR, but also Bad Blood is a historical account, and it's interesting.
Most business books are of the "here's how you ought to behave" variety. Most of these were written to win the author consulting gigs. The vast majority are formulaic and bland. Also, to hit a publisher's wordcount/shelf-space targets, they're always heavily padded. 99.9% of them would be better off in much more concise bullet-point format.
Of course there are a lot of edge cases and books that don't fit neatly into any category. And there are some books, like the Hagakure, Meditations, and the Bible itself, which started off as clear-cut examples of "here's how you ought to behave" but later became historically important.
karaterobot
He's not talking about books like that, I think he's talking about things pop sci and management books, but struggled with a way to describe only those books and not anything else that falls under the broad hemisphere of non-fiction. You could say that he's begging the question ("books I think are the problem are, in fact, the problem") but I immediately felt I knew the kind of book he meant, so I was not confused by it.
jsharf
He's not saying that all non fiction is bad, just that the incentives are misaligned, and to be fair at least in my experience, there are a lot of popular non-fiction books where each chapter is repetitive, and I feel the whole thing could have been written in 2-3 chapters, if publishing a 30-page nonfiction book wasn't taboo
nottorp
It's about those self improvement books that in 99.99% of the cases can be summarized in one phrase.
Unfortunately you can't print and bind just one phrase because no one will pay for it... or will they?
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xxr
Yeah, it sounds like the author is referring to the “thoughtlord” strain that evolved out of self-help over the last decade or so.
zoklet-enjoyer
I've never heard that term. Basically self help disguised as unbiased information or what?
quchen
A good example is "the subtle art of not giving a fuck". It's a book where the author rediscovers stoicism, badly, hidden within a chapter where they use "fuck" a lot. Reading any amount of say Seneca will be better, but Seneca is terse and dead for more than 70 or so years, which isn't a very good business case.
xxr
I just mean the fluffy thought leader/influencer junk that doesn't go much deeper than the obvious
jokethrowaway
Non-fiction is a bad term.
An historical account is not fiction (because it happened) but it read as well as a fiction book.
Agassi's biography would be another example.
zoklet-enjoyer
Turing's Cathedral is another great one
InitialLastName
I just wish he had applied a little bit of curation to his research before he put them on the page. Insight into the way the design team worked together is fascinating; recitation of cafeteria menu pricing is not.
zoklet-enjoyer
Yeah, I listened to the audio book and there were some sections where I completely zoned out
Insanity
Yup for anyone interested in the history of computing I highly recommend that one as well.
phoe-krk
Reading this most made me immediately think that there's more than just misalignment of the writer and the reader: there's also the incentive of the publisher, which might be misaligned with either, or both, or simply utterly puzzling and confusing.
Anecdata: as glad as I am for Apress for working with me and releasing my own book about a part of Common Lisp (which is, technically, non-fiction!), I still cannot fathom their re-release of "Interpreting LISP" [1] - a book that I hated to give a zero-star rating on Reddit [2] but that I can only warn people about, if I am to be acting in good faith.
[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-2707-7
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/6qc61v/second_edition...
Ekaros
I recommend you to sometime go to look at second-hand markets for books. That is less selective antiquarians and especially something like salvation army or flea markets. Places that accept donations of books and then try to resell them for very cheap are good picks. Just browse through some sections and notice the lower range that has been printed. Not just in fiction, but also non-fiction or maybe really weird combinations like horoscope and cookbooks...
waste_monk
>I recommend you to sometime go to look at second-hand markets for books. That is less selective antiquarians and especially something like salvation army or flea markets. Places that accept donations of books and then try to resell them for very cheap are good picks.
This is a very dangerous recommendation! You will inevitably leave with more books, and soon enough you'll find you've filled a bookshelf and need another, which will then look bare with only a few books, so you go and acquire more books... next thing you know, your house is primarily composed of bookshelves.
kenjackson
There are services (I use one, but I think there are several) that just do like 2 page summaries of these sorts of books. I just read those.
That said, I feel like I know most things in most books of this form. My trouble is actually doing what they say. And before you suggest something like Atomic Habits -- I also read the 2-page summary of that book.
quesera
Two pages is too few to effectively summarize some of the books in this genre.
But two pages is far more than most of these books would deserve.
mindwok
There are rare examples of non fiction books that don’t feel like this, and when you stumble upon them it feels wonderful. For example, I’ve always loved Meditations by Marcus Aurelius for this reason - it was written for him, and so it’s free of the peacocking or status gaming you get in modern self help type books.
illiteratehn
I suppose that's technically non-fiction.
Nothing more depressing than hearing the book tastes of non-bookish but "educated" people. Like it's really really sad and makes you wonder about the future of humanity, and really what do these people do with their time.
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bog_hag
The podcast If Books Could Kill is almost exclusively about exactly this issue.
samspot
In my experience these bad books often are missing acknowledgements and citations. If you can't thank a single person for helping make your book, then its not worth reading.
jhsvsmyself
Author needs a filter for selecting good books. Best one I have found is only read books recommended twice.
jjice
Yeah I've seen this as well with self betterment non-fiction
> If you read a few of these books, you inevitably notice the patterns: every chapter begins with an anecdote...
It really feels like padding sometimes. I've read some books where the anecdote does provide some value as a lead in to a topic, like in Extreme Ownership. Most of the time though, it really feels like a way to hit a publisher minimum page count.
I personally see a shorter book as a potentially good thing, not a lack of value. Not that page count is a great measure of the value a book can provide, but I definitely don't see it as a negative.
The author is indeed talking about non-fiction books, but, more specifically, a genre of books that I call "airport books". These are mass-market self-help, HBR fanfic, blogposts, that are bound and sold as books.
There's a whole higher echelon of non-fiction books that are more like academic books targeting a learned mass culture. These are often academic books with all or most of the footnotes and citations shaved off. Or they're just incredibly well written non-fiction storytelling, like the books of David McCullough, to give one example. Another: the essays by Mark Grief (even his one academic monograph is a stellar read by the standards of academic writing).
> Because we have too many books already, and publishing as a status play pollutes the information environment.
Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries. The "too many books" argument runs into, I believe, an unspoken desire by the writer. Eventually you begin to notice what's worth reading and what isn't. You begin to trust certain publishers and writers over others. You begin to cultivate your own tastes and filter. Sometimes, you also just want a syllabus that lays out the "major works" in a field for you. Sometimes you want to find that out for yourself. Which is all to say, this writer seems to be asking for only something like Wikipedia or fiction, with non-fiction books dissolved and absorbed into the former. But one of the best parts of non-fiction writing is the author's point of view, their personality, their voice.