Mass market non-fiction has bad incentives
borretti.me
borretti.me
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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...
- bad blood (about theranos)
- SPQR
- King Leopold’s Ghost
- Lost in Math
- masters of doom
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.
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.
Unfortunately you can't print and bind just one phrase because no one will pay for it... or will they?
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.
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.
But two pages is far more than most of these books would deserve.
As far as I understood things a few years ago the company was surviving bc one of the giants bought their service for its employees.
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.
Fun anecdote (because I can no longer remember the source):
There's this Roman author deriding the practice of filling one's villa with books for the sole purpose of showing them off at parties, and not reading them.
So the future of humanity, much like its past, will probably be like its present: pretentious faux culture for the many, laborious work for the few, and a big divide in between which educated populists manipulate.
> 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.