The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing? | Hacker News Reader

The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing?

dearheadofmine.substack.com

57 pointssamclemens65 comments

There is just more of everything. It's as if the attention economy got flooded in the last two years, and everyone is drowning in noise.

Plus reading is competing with all the other ways to spend time. Podcasts are great for nonfiction. Substack and blogs are a much better format for many ideas. Then there's YouTube, and many ways to spend time that aren't ingesting non-fiction.

Besides, a lot of non-fiction just isn't that great. Many books should have been a blog post. These books are rarely a rewarding experience for me, unless it's from a rare combo of historian and good writer.

> the sensibility of nonfiction market is far more catered to men

The book industry is three quarter female. In my experience, book stores visibly cater to a female demographic (featured books, general selection).

https://www.leeandlow.com/blog/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/dad-books-are-a-dying-bre...

> Besides, a lot of non-fiction just isn't that great. Many books should have been a blog post. These books are rarely a rewarding experience for me, unless it's from a rare combo of historian and good writer.

Many non-fiction books are essentially PR material for the author. They don't write these books, because they have interesting thoughts that are too complicated and long for a blog post, but because their career plan involves being some kind of a public intellectual and writing a book is a part of that. They often have a single idea, that in itself might be an interesting one, but it's simple enough that it could indeed be entirely fleshed out in a blog post or an essay rather than a book.

This is helped along by the number of people willing to cynically offer up a blurb, or even a glowing review, to something mediocre or seriously flawed that they may not even have read. I'm sure the blurbers think they're just doing someone a favour (and/or playing the game so that they will receive reciprocation), and the reviewers are probably less often crooked than simply busy/lazy, but it all goes to make it much harder for good, substantial work to stand out.

Most readers are women, and the largest genre by far is romance novels, so book stores catering to women is a matter of chasing sales.

Otherwise fully agree with your points. The non-fiction market is easier to saturate as there's only so many unique angles on something, and people will look for something that feels authoritative rather than something fresh, while in fiction you're likely to read many similar premises because it's what you like.

I'm not surprised, and I don't see it as a problem. Every clothing store is the same.

It just felt odd to blame a small part of your demographic as a matter of course.

Most retail outside a few niches (hunting, sports, videogames, etc) cater largely to female shoppers.

> There is just more of everything

If that was the cause, 1) book sales would drop overall, and 2) nonfiction books would perform the same as fiction books. The OP says neither are true:

"What has happened in the last ten years is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago."

They suggest some explanation:

fiction/nonfiction reading habits are extremely gendered, with 80% of women making up the fiction market, and nonfiction being a more 50-50 proposition.

and

Proportionally we are gaining many more women as readers and losing our few men.

EDIT: But they add: "The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality."

Could it be that non-fiction is less competitive against other formats than fiction? I will read the book they made movies about. I don't feel that way about non-fiction.

The change in non-fiction sales is in the last 10 years, according to the OP; movies and computer games have been around for much longer.

Most people give away attention tidbits for free via social media: TikToks, YouTube shorts, posts on Reddit.

That means attention can be sated by microdosing on free attention morsels rather than paying for something long-form that requires investment.

People drowning in free attention and dopamine might not have a need to pay for a premium attention sink.

This is happening at an enormous scale. An evening book or prestige movie might be supplemented by doom scrolling sloppy content and memes. Instead of authors being paid for supplying entertainment, ads are being watched.

The companies that empower this are worth trillions.

Yeah I think this is pretty easy to explain: YouTube (sure, there’s terrible terrible channels out there, but also great ones and a fair many fine-to-good ones), Nebula/Curiosity Stream, podcasts, substacks (lol), LLMs, Anna’s Archive/LibGen, and even the Internet Archive. It's not 1994, if you want to learn, you don't need a book to do it.

It's not some grand conspiracy, people are going to gravitate to what is more efficient/convenient lol

What is their source that the non-fiction book market is collapsing? Their entire premise seems to come down to the fact that non-fiction in 2025 took a smaller share of the top 25 best-selling, hardcover books compared to 2015. It's baffling enough to draw any conclusions from the top 25 of anything, but then to narrow down to hardcover disregards any confounding effects of preferences in format. On top of that they seem to be strangely unaware of this whole phenomenon called ebooks that has been taking the market over by storm.

Besides, non-fiction isn't analogous to fiction, it's not a useful category even. The subset of people who may read biographies may be very different from those who may read popular science or those who read self-help. There is no common denominator encompassing all of these other than the fact that it is a written medium. Fiction is different this way that it is a creative expression often read for the sake of reading and the point is not so much to reach the end. What would be more useful to see is the trend of specific categories of non-fiction over time and which ones are growing and which ones are not.

Perhaps in some ironic way, this article demonstrates why interest in non-fiction may be declining. When you take a singular, weak data point and stretch it over 5 pages saying the same thing, to create a complete non-issue over something that concludes nothing of significance by the end, you have to wonder if one would want to read more of such spiel.

Stretching nothing, but encompassing a fairly standard payload. “The crisis of men is they don’t trust us, the authorities.” No need to pin down why. We’ve poisoned the well so the article is done.

I started reading and at about the half-way point, I decided to search for "AI", "LLM", "generative", which all came up blank. At that point I closed the tab and headed back here. #1 reason I would be very skeptical of purchasing a book published in 2026 is AI. Unfortunately, you need to overcome a pretty big hump in convincing me that there was no AI involved in authoring.

I don't necessarily mind reading AI generated content. But the bar you need to clear is: why would I read (or watch or play) what you generate with AI compared to me just directly asking the AI?

To be clear: this isn't meant as a rhetorical question. There are AI generated works I'm happy to consume. It's meant as a real bar that you can clear. But it's also non-trivial, and the goalposts are moving as AI becomes better and easier to use.

This is the bar with other works as well. If you would hire it buy anything that’s just a mindless AI dump, why not use your $5/mo GPT sub?

Especially with the current rate of progress, you asking ChatGPT today probably means you'll get a way better answer than whatever the author got using a model from last year.

This, and the fact that GPT is writing for you personally. A text written to persuade a publisher, or to manipulate Google results, has the deck stacked hard against it vs. asking even a cheap AI that can size you up personally.

I agree with you in principle, but I think this ignores the reality. Many nonfiction categories are overrun by self-published AI slop generated at an industrial scale by hustlers in low-CoL countries, never as much as proofread by a human. So yes, in theory, good AI-assisted books may exist. But in practice, they're more or less guaranteed to be drowned out because they take much longer to produce (and are written only if the author has something to say).

I'm not sure the low cost of living of the guy who kicks off the AI generation still makes much of a difference?

This might have been more important when the human still had to invest quite a few hours.

In any case, why do we care about the cost of living of the author? Notionally, my adopted home of Singapore is one of the highest cost of living countries on earth, but I'm not sure that makes me nor my AI slop any better? Especially I don't think my output is any better than before I moved to Singapore.

> I'm not sure the low cost of living of the guy who kicks off the AI generation still makes much of a difference? ... In any case, why do we care about the cost of living of the author?

It seems like you're trying to catch me doing secret racism or something like that, but I'm just stating the facts. They appear to overwhelmingly live in places where you can get very rich if you publish 100 books a month and make $100 on each. They don't operate in the shadows, they share tips and photos of their pads and cars on social media. Many of them say they live in India and so forth.

There is a lot of curation and editing that go into AI generated content. Like if you just use an AI to write from a prompt, you’ll just get slop (vibe writing), but if you plan it, review the bullet points, delete and add points that make the narrative stronger, have it sketch some writing out after you are happy with what it is covering, then rewrite that because LLMs have absolutely no sense for word rhythm.

This is logical, but it’s also a lemon market. You don’t know the author, editor and publisher did anything of the sort, unless you’re the sort of person who doesn’t need the book. But if you do see an LLMism, it’s a strong sign of cost-cutting.

If done right you couldn’t tell either way, and you probably wouldn’t care. The point of writing is to get a message out to the reader as efficiently as possible, don’t waste their time. The writer ensures that, AI is just a tool at that point. The problem with vibe writing with AI is that AI has no sense about wasting the reader’s time.

We should just be judging writing by its quality. There were always bad writers who wrote like LLMs or worse. It takes a lot of practice to write well.

Nothing has really changed: bad writers using AI will still be bad writers. Good writers using AI, with some effort put into learning how to use it, can benefit a lot from it in terms of (at least) writing good content faster.

Nice, now add slackers and non-writers to the equation.

Nothing changes, bad writing is just more uniform.

Look, you're must not saying anything. "If done right ... you probably wouldn’t care". Yes, correct. It's done bad, so I don't like it, and the visible slack is a sign of slack. Would you like to push back in some way for some reason? What's the call to action here?

My pushback is that AI can be used for writing, and the results will depend on the person using it. It’s like a type writer doesn’t make anyone a great writer either, but it improve their legibility at least.

LLMisms are almost universally results of using a narrow set of mainstream offerings from Anthropic and Openai. Even Muse Spark has style much less "sloppy" than Claude et al, let alone Chinese LLMs. I mean yes, they have their own tics, but if you don know them you won't even notice.

But I do know them, and so do you, and they’re signs of cost cutting partly for the reason you mention. They’re the careless, basic “no-brainer” choice of models, plus a lack of editing, or a very light “edit” in which obvious, even famous tics are left in. (Many real editors would clean up writers’ tics.) So it’s possible care was put into it, but tics visibility is evidence against it and not evidence for it. If your text does pass and educated readers don’t see it, it’s a consequence of care and intent, which is what we’re really asking for.

I think if you read a little bit further in the article you would find that this attitude is exactly why the author believes there is a collapse in non-fiction book.

> The collapse of nonfiction is [...] a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority

People don't want to read non-fiction because they don't trust the people writing it.

Honestly most non fiction books title sound like linkedin posts and have been for decades even before linkedin was a thing.

I didn't wait for AI to lose trust in people writing them, they are just all mostly repulsive.

Yeah, frankly, this doesn't make sense to me. Has the author checked any nonfiction categories on Amazon recently? In many categories, 80-90% of all new releases are obvious AI slop. And even for non-self-published releases, about 20-30% previews get flagged as AI by Pangram, compared to roughly 0% pre-2023.

I don't buy (new) nonfiction because it now feels like playing Minesweeper.

Likewise. I'm only interested in books that were either published before 2024, or are by authors I respect (e.g. Patterson & Hennessy), or by respectable academic publishers (e.g. Cambridge University Press). I used not to be so picky.

It also presents a bit of chicken & egg for new authors: nobody knows them, and now few will risk it, so they stay unknown. They must pursue other avenues to gain traction; far more than was needed a few years ago.

The deluge of AI books on Amazon has really been quite amazing. Between them and the higher risk of poorly-printed books, I don't buy from Amazon anymore. Now it's always direct from publishers.

Shouldn't that hit nonfiction and fiction equally?

Why would that be the case? Fiction books are already imaginary, so it makes less of a difference whether it is human-imaginary or reshuffled-by-LLM-imaginary. Non-fiction I expect to not be hallucinated-out-of-the-ether.

For the last couple of years I’ve only read non fiction. For me reading about real life events is far more entertaining and also a great learning experience that I can’t get from a fiction book.

I'm in the same boat as you, having only read non-fiction the past few years. It appears quite ironic that the entertainment occurring in the real life events is surpassing the entertainment I hear one usually derives from fiction.

Opposite here. I almost exclusively read fiction now. I learn enough outside reading and use books exclusively as a form of entertainment.

You can "great learning experience" about the human nature from a good fiction book too. Classics have another function - being cultural landmarks, one can refer to in non-fictional contexts as well.

I read both both my fiction is almost exclusively Japanese and my non-fiction Western/Europe science/history-adjacent

See, because of the learning experience I steer away from non-fiction books. I am deeply afraid of the narrative red string applied to reality - connecting a tiny subset of the observable data points to a simplified interpretation/explanation of the whole. If I want to learn, I look at raw data, reports, white papers, etc.. Because authors always have some bias or other, especially when they decide to write a book-length document. (Except, of course, a data catalog of sorts, like a lexicon or other exhaustive enumeration - those are usually a good starting point) I have enough of my own biases, and rather get a diverse set of inputs on a topic. Fiction though? Sure, let's suspend our disbelief and have some fun.

Edit: to clarify: this is not me accusing authors of non-fiction books to always have some evil agenda to push. One human only has limited capacity and things will always fall through the cracks. Do your own research with the constraints you actually care about, if you can.

Yes, everything outside of personal experience is somewhat fictional - one probably wouldn't agree with the biases, assumptions or assessments of any author/content creator.

I think there is something deeply wrong with the state of contemporary fiction.

I was on Spotify the other day checking out the fantasy audiobook offerings and the only item that wasn't absolutely repulsive was Jim dale reading Harry Potter. Everything else comes off like cheap asset flips on steam or thinly veiled rants that you'd find on obscure subreddits.

Fiction is a variety of oft-useless drivel when the world is chock-full of compelling, urgent non-fiction.

Altho... science fiction is hardly useless, when it mentally prepares the ground.

Lately whenever I enter a book store in Italy, I'm overwhelmed by the amount of fiction romance for girls and womens. I get 3/4 of readers are womens but all I'm left with is a gigantic pile of nonfiction shit I'm not interested about, I know for sure most of it will leave nothing to me. Increasingly way too many people attempted to sell a bunch of nonfiction books, and it shows there amounts of unsold copies. Most of them being a marketing political campaign. There gems for sure but it's becoming increasingly harder to find them. Also the only fiction books I'm interested about are sci-fi, and the dedicated space is soo small that you feel a weirdo with strange hobbies. But I swear to you, cause I read a fantasy novel from my wife's selection, that a saga like The Expanse is 100 times better written than all that new shit. Finally rest of the book store is now dedicated to manga and graphic novels. Not bad I love them but the ratio is overwhelming as well

Absolutely crazy and useless article IMO in that they never mention AI.

They cite readers being interested in learning - well what's the best way to do so nowadays? Ask ChatGPT.

Even worse, you can ask ChatGPT to describe the learnings of any reasonably popular nonfiction book directly. No it's not a perfect substitute, nor will the learnings be as memorable, but it's reasonably good enough. That's why I haven't bought a nonfiction book in a long time.

Imo Eventually we will circle back to nonfiction quality books, for one just to decrease screen time :) for second we actually need them even for chatgpt

One thing I've learned listening to Monocle podcasts is that non-fiction writers have to hustle a lot to be successful. Many of their regular guests are non-fiction writers and they are constantly talking about what conference they just came back from, what workshops they've been running, etc. And part of this hustling is appearing in Monocle podcasts and news programs.

Fiction writers also have to hustle a lot to be successful. The average full time writer in the UK would've made more at McDonalds in the UK, and I doubt it's much better elsewhere.

It's both an extremely competitive field, and it's incredibly hard to convince people to read your book even for those near the top of their field in terms of quality.

But non-fiction writers have an additional problem, that I think the article glosses over:

If I like, say, romance novels, I'm not looking for new books to be dramatically different to what I read before. A lot of genre readers - the by far largest genres are romance and thrillers - expect books that stick closely to expected conventions. Romance readers will form a mob with pitchforks if there isn't a happily ever after, for example.

Non-fiction, on the other hand, must set itself apart. Why should I read your How to Win Friends and Influence People look-alike when I can read Dale Carnegie's original?

It needs to be very different or clearly better and I have to find it in between the many hundreds of thousands (not an exaggeration; might even under-estimate the number at this point) of new non-fiction titles every year, where fiction titles are not:

You don't need 50 books on meditation, or 50 books on repairing your washing machine, but you might have 50 books in the same narrow sub-genre of fiction because it's what you like to read, and so the opportunity cost of picking up an unknown name feels very different.

A whole lot of the non-fiction market is also being cannibalised by blogs, tiktok, youtube videos and the like - and LLMs -, whereas a video is more likely to tease the fiction book rather than replace the need for it.

Also when I think of better end of non-fiction. How many books on certain topic I need? Say ornithology or on birds... Maybe a few at best. Unless I am collector or interested in that specific niche. Which already massively cuts down audience. Take history. Huge overall. But if you only go for specific events, periods or areas(town for example) it might cut down audience significantly.

So I think it is fair to say for fiction that some niches could be lot smaller say than generic fantasy, romance and such. And also I can read lot more fantasy books if I get around to it... Some of them are bloody enormous series too.

When I saw the literature lists my sons got from school for reading, I was not surprized boys get turned of on reading at a young age. With education being this feminized ( I think over here >95% of k12 teachers are now female, and 70-80% of high school), I do not even know they even see how unappealing and biased the selection is for the average young male.

I was in the central library a year or two ago, and I had to ask directions to the stacks, because the shelves were all being rearranged (downsized) and none of the diagram handouts matched the floor plan anymore.

Strolling down the aisle with the reference librarian, I asked about biographies and she said something like "the person that the book is written about" and I said "...Subject?" and she reluctantly admitted that most of the library patrons haven't learned library terminology, so the staff uses simple English to explain stuff to patrons.

I donno, read thee classics! They're classics for a reason. You can't go wrong with them. You'll certainly not like them all, but find your niche, there's plenty to choose from. There's plenty of history, philosophy and politics books out there for the non-fiction category, too! Those are not quite self-help in the way we understand most non-fiction, but the ideas in them are far-reaching, some even eternal. For the later, Philosophize This (youtube podcast) is a great help! Enjoy!

Since I do not want to subscribe in the substack feed, here is what I see as a serious reason

1. Shipping costs 2. Nonfiction books are huge. Who will read these books like e.g. "The Elements of Statistical Learning" 3. Pedagogy collapsed and barrier to access has skyrocketed 4. LeanPub/Gumroad are alternative means of distribution 5. Bad presentation full or references, and show-off 6. They do not usually give solutions to every day problems

I'm not really sure I'd categorize David Sedaris as non-fiction or put him in the intellectual high-end of that.

I love his books, but they are the literary version of a stand-up show.

To paraphrase: If an audience of live arts is willing to go see a ballet, they must have an appetite for challenge, difficulty, or complexity. There are signs of life and appetite for being challenged in 2026 - Jimmy Carr sold out his tour.

I recently cleaned out an IT department that had been around since 2005. Mostly old workstations, gross keyboards, floppies and about a cubic metre of manuals.

The market for printing training manuals and textbooks was dwindling up until the early 20’s, but it was completely wiped out by covid.

The gender move is divisive and intellectually lazy. Publishing trend -> it's men's fault. But wait, it's actually a societal trust crisis. Come one. Can we please not entertain trash like that?

No proof of the connection was provided, it's just virtue signalling. In times like these we don't need more division and hate.

I doubt it. Trash is collapsing.

If non-fiction book market = self help, business help, advice. Good riddance?

I might be wrong but I feel like most of that stuff is the same as YouTube, TikTok. Random person with no qualifications realizes they can maybe make some money by writing about their own random opinions on how things are with no actual data, just feels.

Someone else mentioned history but AFAICT, at least in the YouTube realm, lots of "history" channels are people with alternative hot take ideas about history portrayed as history experts, because it's what gets views. I'm only guessing that same basic fact, controversial ideas get sales, means similar things happen with books. Especially with it being easier than ever to publish.

> Someone else mentioned history but AFAICT, at least in the YouTube realm, lots of "history" channels are people with alternative hot take ideas about history portrayed as history experts, because it's what gets views.

Even worse, it’s shallowly regurgitated ideas of other people’s prior works, with music and visuals and all.

Recently, on my formerly favourite new history channel [0], I noticed editing quirks (that would have never passed the bar if a human read it) and overly consistent vocalization… it's jumped the shark :(

[0] Fall of Civilisations https://youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations

> overly consistent vocalization

Is this...really an issue? I can't really blame people for automating their own voice.

Being able to predict cadence and pitch makes me want to fall asleep rather than listen.

Though it might be other people‘s whole reason to listen to long form podcasts in the first place

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