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Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
- Finnucane 3mo agoMakes sense. Self-help books are kinda the human slop of the publishing business. Easily replaced by AI slop? Probably.
- cjs_ac 3mo agoTo be (slightly) more charitable to the genre and to AI, self-help books are a blog post's worth of content padded out to look worthy of the sticker price, so LLMs provide a fair bit of value in extracting the signal from the noise (assuming they do it accurately).
- xracy 3mo agoalso assuming there's signal in that noise...
- paride5745 3mo agoGood. The vast majority of self-help books out there are ghost-written upsales trash.
- throwaw12 3mo agounfortunately, as a reader, I am not buying any books post-ChatGPT era. Author maybe did their best, but it anyways feels like I will be buying ChatGPT's opinion
- stuaxo 3mo agoHow can you read LLM generated text, it makes me feel nausious ? The same phrases and patterns repeated over and over again, blech.
- throwaw12 3mo ago> How can you read LLM generated text I am not reading most things post-ChatGPT era (books, articles, and even Jira tickets), by habit I am looking at the dates (hopefully they are correct) and then adjusting my effort level accordingly, anything post-ChatGPT depending on the blog author I send to summarization, if I really trust and know the author then I read their article.
- Scroll_Swe 3mo agoGood, they where always slop
- dvh 3mo agoNow I'm curious, were there any self-help fiction books?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- threetonesun 3mo agoZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, I suppose also the business-parable style books like Who Moved My Cheese?.
- Insanity 3mo agoIf you count Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, almost any fiction book with a philosophical angle would fit that description. Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.
- threetonesun 3mo agoI wouldn't say any fictional book with a philosophical angle fits, but ones that could have been written as non-fiction but for the purposes of getting the point across weren't. Phoenix/Unicorn Project are good examples!
- stevenwoo 3mo agoI had trouble finishing Zen and the Art because my recollection is he drones on and on about the philosophy after the initial set up. The story disappeared. I felt kind of being had because I remember being intrigued by the title in a used bookshop as a teenager and buying it (this was before the internet) so my viewpoint is biased by that. My college philosophy textbooks managed to be more interesting and deeper than Zen, even a book about Aurelius was more interesting to me.
- comrade1234 3mo agoPretty much all of them.
- wps 3mo agoI never understood how anyone could write more than 40 pages of “self help”. Especially not for a general audience. All self help boils down to the very foundation of your worldview, all other advice stems from it.
- mrweasel 3mo agoAll weight loss books, if they are truthful, boils down to: eat healthy, exercise more, everything in moderation. That doesn't really make you money, which is what the author actually want. Other categories are equally padded, or the topic has been sufficiently covered for 2000 years or more. The whole spiel about "I just want to help others in the same situation" died with the Internet, because for the past 30 years it has been entirely feasible to publish your advice and guidance for for free. The books are just for money and fame.
- beej71 3mo agoIt depends on the topic, of course. I have a self-help book for my computer science students that talks about the best way to get a computer science bachelor's it weighs in at 64 pages. It's too small to print, but it really doesn't need to be any bigger.
- ghaff 3mo agoA lot of non-fiction fits in 50-100 pages or so. Longer than a magazine article. But it's not publishable through a publisher if it's less than 250-300 pages. One of the reasons I probably won't work through a publisher any longer.
- SkyPuncher 3mo agoThis stat is limited to print-books only. He talks about all sorts of other forms of content, but seems to mysteriously miss audio books. If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience). [0] - https://electroiq.com/stats/audiobook-statistics/ https://electroiq.com/stats/audiobook-statistics/
- losteric 3mo agoHow does this > If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since a2022. Lead to > by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience). I'm not sure I see the math there, when most nonfiction is not self-help books (and an increase in the broader genre says nothing about a specific niche)
- ghaff 3mo agoAnd my experience is that the freebie books available through your local library's online service absolutely pollute the available offerings with self-help and associated types of books.
- EA-3167 3mo agoEven more than audiobooks self-help has become the preserve of substack blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels. A lot of the low end of older gen media has moved over to the low end of modern media.
- nfcampos 3mo agoHe does mention audiobooks, see quoted below > But what about ebooks and audio? Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half. This compares to 46% on print only
- vova_hn2 3mo ago> How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps? Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation? This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video: - you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient) - you can quickly skim through text to find what you need - text can have proper navigation (chapters etc) - texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation) - text is much quicker and cheaper to produce Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
- sigmoid10 3mo agoBeing able to skim, filter and comprehend large amounts of text is much more rare than you might think. More than half of Americans read below sixth grade level and a fifth is functionally illiterate, struggling even with the most basic reading tasks. Videos are the only way for these people to consume any kind of information.
- coldtea 3mo ago>Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation? Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials
- seanw444 3mo agoThere can be a lot to gain from the graphics and audio, depending on the topic.
- twright 3mo agoOne would make a long education video to hold eyeballs longer that can lead to more ad revenue (if that's your goal and your video is sufficiently entertaining). I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830763
- vova_hn2 3mo ago> What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI. Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work. You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice. Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
- Panzer04 3mo agoI think the more salient points for the paywalls is people want pay once access everything, instead of piecemeal. I would certainly be happy to subscribe to "news" in general, but not a dozen different providers for one article apiece.
- vova_hn2 3mo agoHmmm, "Spotify for news" that collects subscriptions and distributes them proportionally to articles clicked/read or whatever can be a viable business model.
- _pdp_ 3mo ago> Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are. Well this is the difficult part. You can 10x the number of followers and still have less than 50 true fans. On the actual content, I am actually not surprised at all. These AI systems are surprisingly convincing when giving personal advise - for better or worse.
- bryanrasmussen 3mo agodepending on the medium one might be better served with a single middling fan with a lot of disposable income, then 10 true with little money available.
- plagiarist 3mo agoWith a book you cannot do "that's not what I wanted to read, I'll adjust the prompt."
- Quarrelsome 3mo agofollowers is a shit metric that only advertisers care for but they also want like 50-100k bare minimum. You need to find 1k people who are willing to give you money, or go out of their way to advocate for you.
- _pdp_ 3mo agoThat is a better frame of mind - it is not 1000 true fans but a 1000 customers.
- ryansalsman 3mo agoThat's the exact idea! https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
- delichon 3mo agoFiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful to the source, except as required by my_movie_preferences.md". Reading the text may become as rare as learning ancient Greek to read the Odyssey.
- aerhardt 3mo agoYou say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.
- ryandrake 3mo agoI wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me. Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
- jaimie 3mo agoNothing, Forever was basically this idea applied to Seinfeld. The video quality was low, but some of the ways it captured the same absurdities as Seinfeld was remarkable at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
- ben_w 3mo agoOn a similar vein, I was just thinking of the TNG episode Hollow Pursuits earlier today. Somehow, this is one of the episodes I never actually watched, but it is interesting to me how often the Trek scripts cover essentially identical ideas to current discussions about AI: Moriarty insisting to Barclay that he was conscious even when his program wasn't running, Pulaski saying Data was just remixing and not actually intelligent, various examples of deep fakes, cyber addiction, AI going weird sometimes while following orders and sometimes just as an emergent bug.
- formvoltron 3mo agohas bruv updated said book to include tips on using AI to automate?
- operatingthetan 3mo ago>But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time. Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
- josefritzishere 3mo agoBetteridge's law of headlines applies. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Why would anyone ask AI?
- submeta 3mo agoI suspect AI is replacing my need for productivity content much faster than it’s replacing my need for books. I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago. But I still buy books. The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
- the_lonely_phon 3mo agoThis is me too. Just finished the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book, bought on day 1. Have completely replaced Google, stackoverflow, medium, digital ocean documentation, etc. Only HN remains and honestly it’s less to keep my finger on the pulse and more habit than anything these days. Went from a large part of my consumption to zero visits since I got Claude code. Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to AI’s results if all these content streams dry up.
- __alexander 3mo agoPersonally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
- curuinor 3mo agoDale Carnegie created it, Tim Ferriss is a century too late to point as origin.
- ransom1538 3mo agoDale Carnegie -> Jim Rohn -> Tony Robbins -> [all hacks now]
- curuinor 3mo agothe man leveraged the fact that his name was the same as Andrew Carnegie (having no relation) to launch a publishing empire. it was hacks from the beginning
- MengerSponge 3mo agoHighly recommend "If Books Could Kill" https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social It really is all the same book.
- sharadov 3mo agoAll the writers that I love to hate - hariri, gladwell! Will give it a listen
- sanswork 3mo agoI wanted to love it since despite being a self help reader I can definitely see a lot of the bad/dangerous advice given all over the place but I often found them really stretching to make stuff negative and being very smug about it which just made it the same issue as the source material. Especially annoying since in most cases there were really solidly valid negatives to go after in the books. It's very much a lets build a straw man then tear it down podcast.
- heisenbit 3mo agoSome of the best books on JS which were online went recently off-line for that reason. Blog post by the author: https://2ality.com/ https://2ality.com/ (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer)
- duckfruit 3mo agoThis makes me indescribably sad. Dr. Rauschmayer's books and articles helped me tremendously early in my career. I owe him a debt of gratitude.
- throwaway2037 3mo agoI read the blog post. It is interesting to me. First, a dumb question: Does putting your website behind a Cloudflare "human tester thingy" help prevent this situation? If not, continue reading. Let's construct a parallel universe. Suppose AI/LLM scaped all JavaScript content except his website(s). Would the outcome look different? I doubt it. In the end, technical books are dead. They will be replaced with AI/LLMs. Even Stack Overflow (which I started using in 2010) effectively killed my need to buy expensive technical books from O'Reilly. And AI/LLMs basically killed Stack Overflow.
- chris_money202 3mo agoSomething not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive
- iLoveOncall 3mo agoI would be extremely surprised if piracy accounts for any serious dent in the sales of books.
- chris_money202 3mo agoIf this was true, they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns
- jasonfarnon 3mo ago" they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns" I don't think so. That behavior only tells you the modest cost of sending takedown notices/threatening letters is less than the (supposed) lost revenue. Kids I know (I'm a teacher) don't seem at all aware of it when complaining about textbook costs and I kind of vaguely hint they look online for it--nothing like the popularity of napster.
- chris_money202 3mo agoTo get the DOJ and FBI to move on on this takes a lot more than submitting paperwork, costs a lot more too.
- dartharva 3mo agoSuing is a lucrative business in America, so much so that there are entire businesses dedicated to it. It doesn't have to actually protect anything.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoThe implication is that the self-help books were scraped from Anna's Archive to train the LLMs, thus the content in the books has been integrated into the LLM and may be regurgitated on command. With the content then being available straight from an LLM, there's no need to buy the books.
- mwkaufma 3mo agoGrifter publishing-slop sector devastated by slop automation.
- yieldcrv 3mo agoeveryone has their own contribution to this observation but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022? that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest its the law of diminishing returns this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
- innocentoldguy 3mo agoSelf-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.
- brlewis 3mo agoThe article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.
- beej71 3mo agoThe author even mentions this. Why watch a 20-minute video when you can just scrub to the 40 seconds you need? A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.
- levocardia 3mo agoConversely: the self-help nonfiction book existed because it was the only practical way to monetize "good advice" or "good ideas" at scale. Now you can do a podcast or a youtube series and try to make money from advertising/affiliates/etc, but for a very long time, "buy my book" was the only game in town
- keybored 3mo ago> [the numbers] > Let that sink in for a minute. Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing? The self-involved industry is in shambles. > What’s actually going on? Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you. It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way. --- I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus. People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
- raziel2701 3mo agoIn my corner of the internet people started to recommend reading fiction rather than self-help. Books like the count of montecristo for example, where the characters overcome through perseverance, patience and planning. The criticism of self-help books in my little internet bubble is that if you've read one you've read them all. So why not go for works of fiction that are time-tested and are greatly entertaining and nourishing?
- jaharios 3mo agoI like your corner of the internet
- nfcampos 3mo agoFor what it’s worth, I personally discovered something similar with another category of nonfiction books - economics and business. I read a lot of these circa 10-15 years ago and the rate of new signal id get from each new one eventually became low enough that I stopped reading in that category altogether.
- Daz912 3mo ago[dead]
- havblue 3mo agoI'm going to admit that I tend to hit a brick wall when these books tell me I need to fill out a worksheet if I really want to make a difference. You're telling me I have to do homework now? But ai can give me feedback on my thoughts anyway, directly what I'm interested in, and provide sources, even though it's probably patronizing me? Not a difficult decision.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago[dead]
- latexr 3mo agoI’m not going to defend the self-help industry, but your dismissal made me think of how Craig Ferguson described bad rehabs VS good rehabs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZVWIELHQQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZVWIELHQQY Yes, of course you need to put in work to enact change. The bigger the change, the more work you need to put in. That desire for a quick and easy solution to hard problems is exactly what lead to the proliferation of scams.
- havblue 3mo agoCraig Ferguson is magnetic isn't he? Great monologue. I think with ai, when you get feedback, you are putting in a form of work though. You're practicing recall of previous concepts and having them reinforced while you can get on a narrower and narrower path of what worked and what didn't. Granted, I have no clue whether this is better than other forms of doing the work like going to a support group or filling out worksheets and journaling, but I do think it is beneficial.
- zem 3mo agoself help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.
- sublinear 3mo agoI'm more curious how Publisher's Weekly defines "sales" in this era of subscription plans (e.g. Kindle Unlimited). Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits? It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.
- neves 3mo agoProbably podcasts killed them.
- MollyRealized 3mo agoHe speaks to three examples: YT videos, podcasts, and newsletters/etc. With YT videos and podcasts, I either yank the transcript and pipe it through whisper.cpp, or with YT videos, I'll use the built-in "Ask [Gemini]" and ask it to summarize.
- themafia 3mo agoProbably not. And you certainly cannot use a retrospective analysis to answer this question. What you needed was a survey.
- throwawaypub 3mo agoI work for a large online news publisher, one of the oldest in the US. Our traffic is down 50% in year. We likely won’t survive for much longer.
- Panzer04 3mo agoPeople use LLMs for news?
- kranke155 3mo agoI suspect AI summaries are just reducing peoples need to click through on anything, possibly.
- adamtaylor_13 3mo agoI don't do news at all. If it's important, someone in my life who spends time on social media will tell me.
- nephihaha 3mo agoMost of it isn't news, it's filtered opinion serving someone's interest
- alok-g 3mo agoAs such I don't. Nevertheless, it explains me what's going on better than the news articles. Also, I think we have oversold the concept of story-telling. Many news articles start with story telling and take a while before coming to the point.
- latexr 3mo agoThere are entire websites built around that, several have been posted to HN. There was even one (I think real news channel) who experimented with generating fake video of fake anchors to deliver “news”.
- NiloCK 3mo agoLong ago a friend of a friend described a job interview at an ice cream / chocolate shop in a local mall. The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc. Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here. --- Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- daytonix 3mo ago"Self-help" readers are probably moving from self-help books to llms because they give them the shallow "fix my life" and "get rich quick" answers they want at a faster rate. Now the redpillers have to think even less about why they are such losers. Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.
- itissid 3mo agoStill too narrow a take on what self help techniques are killable by ai. I also think self help as a bunch of life hacks and habits is precisely what’s wrong with the industry writ large. They are based on what sells in a capitalist system targeting the attention economy. Creating scarcity on supply side of attention(work longer) and demand side(addictive apps). Take Atomic Habits, one of the things it says is out of many is making the habit you want to form easy to do, e.g place sneakers and shorts next to your bed to make a habit to run in the morning. It presumes a lot about how exactly habits are actually internalized, retained and how one falls into or out of them. I’ve fallen in and out of such habits even after I did them for a while(months). Techniques are very ripe to disruption because people don’t quite understand or have time to understand or observe their own mental state, so hacks sell because you can do them(presumably) as a monkey would. It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences. If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too many tears.
- r0s 3mo agoAlmost zero readers buy a book based on the title or content alone. They buy Dr.Phil because they saw him on TV and know a bit about who he is. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people buying books because they respect and admire the author's other work. AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long. Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?
- noveltyaccount 3mo agoI have read countless self help books where I complained about fluffy filler material and the book should have been fifty pages instead of two hundred. Not a surprise to me that a topic distilled through an LLM is a better experience.
- Gigachad 3mo agoOr youtube. The youtube video essays can still be way too much waffle, but it's at least capped out at about 30 minutes and cost you nothing so you can quit if it's not useful.
- TheCapeGreek 3mo agoFor better or worse, AI is beating on video essays too. Maybe my attention span is truly stuffed, but I really can't stand it when a video essay is the most succinct source on a topic - waiting for someone to express their thoughts in speech, with sometimes slow cadences or their own waffling, combined with sponsor segments (yes I use SponsorBlock, but sometimes or on other devices ads get through), etc. So I use AI summary for a lot of informational videos now unless I actually am watching it for the entertainment and production value. I don't need 10 minutes on "this will change the way we look at XYZ" that has only 1 minute of real information in it.
- Gigachad 3mo agoThey are more tolerable as background noise on the TV while you are cooking. Where the length is a feature so you don't have to queue up something else for a while.
- throwaway2037 3mo ago> video essays In the last few months, I have watched many YouTube videos from the Australia Broadcasting Corp (ABC) subtitled "If You're Listening" [1]. They are primarily about geo/political issues, but there are some odd-ball ones about Japanese land-use & development policy. I think that the production is very high quality. (1) They do they research. (2) They find lots of interesting funny old video clips. (3) They add helpful "infographics". (4) They stitch all together with a modestly funny script. All in combination: It works very well. I find that I never need to skip boring parts -- either the script is interesting or the visual content is interesting. Would you consider this type of video a "video essay"? I am honestly curious why ABC produces such high quality content that is given away for (nearly) free on YouTube. I would hazard a guess that they spend no less than 10K USD to produce each episode (surely more, to be honest -- skilled labour isn't cheap in Australia). Does anyone know if these videos are also aired on Australian broadcast TV? (That would help for advertising revenue.) [1] YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN7rBX00xjQ&list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN7rBX00xjQ&list=PLDTPrMoGHs...
- pianopatrick 3mo agoPersonally for me I realized I could learn everything from YouTube for free so I stopped buying most books, just to save money.
- nephihaha 3mo agoEverything is an exaggeration. A lot of things aren't on there and the searches/suggestions are warped, and exclude some of the better videos. I can think of many subjects which are not well served. Scottish history certainly isn't. The only suggestions it tends to give are Scotland History Tours (who is quite good but surface level) and commentators like BBC (who are often way off the mark and have their own agendas)
- mrandish 3mo agoI think the core problem of most self-help books is that at best, they're usually an article's worth of knowledge and insight stretched to book length for economic reasons. To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.
- aussieguy1234 3mo agoHardly. I've read several good ones during the AI era and I'm still reading them. However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book. I'm also in an actual informal bookclub with a few friends. It started in the AI era, all nonfiction books and is still going strong. Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.
- darepublic 3mo agoThere's a lot of self help YouTube videos.
- lancewiggs 3mo agoThe rise in sales of GLP-1 products also coincides with the decline in self-help books. Those products are highly effective at delivering some of the hardest self-help outcomes, so why buy a book when you can inject?
- akoboldfrying 3mo agoGreat point actually.
- Aboutplants 3mo agoAI is probably only a small portion of it. I’m betting most self-help content is consumed via short form video these days and typically done by paid influencers. It’s just shifted from his outdated model
- GreenSalem 3mo agoGood to see a whole genre of scam artists and their books being displaced.
- Nition 3mo ago[dead]
- uwagar 3mo agoauthor says: Before we dive into my dirty laundry, dude, why would i want to dive into your dirty laundry man?
- dcdgo 3mo agoI recently picked up a book at the airport called "Full Stack Human". Wish I hadn't because every second line has "It's not just about X - It's also about Y!" formatting that screamed LLM generated slop. I'd say it most certainly is dead!
- tverbeure 3mo agoFerris isn’t doing himself any favor by writing “Let that sink in” in this blog post.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- rhipitr 3mo agoI think AI will accelerate this, but I think YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts have splintered the market so much there’s not as much space for mega self-help stars anymore, just a lot of middle class ones.
- rapidfl 3mo ago+1 that motivation reel on IG hit so hard... AI is likely correlation not causation. The generation that resonated with the self-help books has aged out. Short form vids on YT, TT, IG taking mind-share is likely the bigger cause.
- maxclark 3mo agoThe average non fiction book is 200 pages, can be summarized in under 10, and is repackaging someone else’s ideas Literary slop being replaced with AI
- bitwize 3mo agoNothing of value would be lost if it did. I feel the same way about the OnlyFans economy.
- mrbonner 3mo ago[dead]
- jdw64 3mo agoI wonder if the '1,000 True Fans' concept, which is basically a traditional model, will still work these days. That aside, isn't the hacking style self help genre itself a kind of outdated relic? Honestly, I've read some of this author's books, and they have a distinctly optimistic 2000s to 2010s vibe. Over time, the delivery of knowledge and methodologies changes. Maybe the issue is that the content no longer fits the times. Looking at the author's books, they're full of healthy living and optimistic narratives. In my view, maybe the problem isn't the old approach itself, but that we need to answer new questions. Like, 'How do I survive in an era where AI takes away jobs?' And I think the most critical point in this post is this passage: 'What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.' We use AI for things we don't consider important. If that's the case, I think the key is to convince the public that what I do is something AI cannot replace.
- nfcampos 3mo agoI think the same will be true of the ‘popular science’ category of nonfiction
- uberex 3mo ago4 hour work weeks is: Draw circle: Set up a highly successful business (prerequisite) Rest of owl: Delegate stuff (what the book says to do). It is pretty useless. Not suprised sales have declined especially since startups probably got harder since when it was written.
- m0llusk 3mo agoPerhaps, but them how do you explain the claimed pattern that sales had been unusually consistent until just recently?
- haritha-j 3mo agoHard to tell without numbers to back it up. The author's baseline is the year chatGPT was released, i have no idea at what rate they've been declining before that.
- enragedcacti 3mo agoWell, the If Books Could Kill episode about The 4 Hour Workweek came out September 2023... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-4-hour-workweek/id1651876897?i=1000628678180 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-4-hour-workweek/id...
- fundad 3mo agoThey took him down, good work gents!
- throwaway2037 3mo agoThis is a brilliant summary. I recall following Michael Lynch's journey while he built TinyPilot (https://tinypilotkvm.com/ https://tinypilotkvm.com/). I was blown away by how hard he grinded to build that business. It just never let up -- the competition. As successful as he was, the exit value seemed like a let down (I say that as a fan!). So, I agree: "Draw circle" by far the hardest part. For "rest of owl", just hire other (grind-ier/thirst-ier) people to do it for you!
- 3mo ago
- edelbitter 3mo ago>The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly. It does disappear. There is already much less expert knowledge shared after the breakdown of those platforms that used to be so good at encouraging it. Both what the clankers can regurgitate and what humans can find themselves on the internet is increasingly stale and thinned. My GPU can generate fairly good content now.. 2023 content.
- DocTomoe 3mo agoNone of Ferris' books is younger than 10 years. Used copies are plentiful, hardly a library who has not been touched. At some time, the market has been satisfied.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoThat might be true but why the steep drop rather than a slow decline?
- jpease 3mo ago[flagged]
- jdthedisciple 3mo agoWhen Tim Ferriss (net worth of ~ $100m?) of all people gets back to a humble "find your 1000 true fans" what chance do I have? :')
- anovikov 3mo ago"AI has become good enough at writing bullshit at scale that many bullshit industries are struggling"
- geraneum 3mo ago> 2025 was the first big drop, 2026 looks more severe, and the only thing that’s really changed in that timeframe is the acceleration of AI. It all hinges on this statement. But I’m not sure it’s really AI that’s doing it, and not just a contributing factor. There’s higher cost of living, inflation, economic uncertainty, seemingly looming financial crisis, etc. A lot of impactful things happened!
- felooboolooomba 3mo agoYes, I'd be interested in seeing this compared to book sales in general.
- Ekaros 3mo agoWeirdly I would expect those things to boost sales. At least of certain type of content at right sale price. People will always look for easy solutions. And self-help is exactly that. Or maybe we are already over the horizon where no hope is left...
- geraneum 3mo agoI doubt people who need desperate help buy these books. Desperate help meaning if you can’t pay rent, medical bills, maintain a family, etc.
- MagicMoonlight 3mo ago[dead]
- alanb99 3mo agoCouple of other anecdotal data points: 1. Guy I know who is an exec coach says that a chatbot can do a lot of what he does. 2. I am absolutely seeing lots of people asking ChatGPT a question and treating its answer as the truth. So I can well believe that, in an age where you can get a quick answer to anything for free, that the market for books is collapsing. Having said that, I also suspect that many of these self-help books are effectively a blog post stretched out over hundreds of pages, so maybe a decline in their sales is no bad thing.
- latexr 3mo ago> I also suspect that many of these self-help books are effectively a blog post stretched out over hundreds of pages, so maybe a decline in their sales is no bad thing. You suspect right. I usually compare them to a pamphlet, but a blog post works too. They’re mostly one core idea padded with interminable stories to illustrate the point. Instead of wasting your money and time on the book, search YouTube for a talk the author has given about it (the more popular the book, the more of the same talk there will be) and watch that. It’ll hit all of the major points.
- prepend 3mo agoExecutive coaches always kind of perplexed me. I’ve tried a few ofer the years and while it was nice to chat with someone smart I found their advice was pretty hit or miss as I read a lot and most of the basic stuff seemed familiar. So I always wondered how they stayed in business and that they seemed at risk for disruption if anyone cared about their market. So I guessed that maybe they’re for people who don’t want to spend time finding and reading. I also was only spending $250/hour so maybe the really good ones cost much more.
- fundad 3mo agoI agree. And the funny thing is the most enjoyable part of LLMs is it's nice to chat with someone smart.
- shevy-java 3mo agoSo, probably AI had a significant impact here, but I noticed this myself, a non-AI using person, where I bought fewer books than before. There are many reasons for this, financial ones but also practical ones (don't have to story physical books). As well as lack of time; I need to manage my time better, so I have to skip on reading too many new books until I have finished reading the existing stack. Plus the www also has a lot of information. AI may have been killing more humans here (it is skynet after all), but the underlying problems started being serious way before AI already, in my opinion. Also google search being ruined by Google; it is so useless nowadays.
- cryptonym 3mo ago> prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine Self-help is not the canary for other genre. Self-help doesn't comme with significant art. Their consumer gets a better experience through LLM that extracts the substance and contextualizes it. It doesn't tell what will happen at scale regarding fiction and other content where people tends to expect a genuine human contribution. Sure you can get success with AI-written or AI-assisted writing, but it doesn't mean human written books will no longer catch interest.
- brador 3mo agoPeople have already actioned most best practise health advice. Weight loss done, sleep fixed, healthy eating done, exercise done. Only mental health and longevity remain outstanding.
- haritha-j 3mo agoHumans already know what's good for them. Self-help books rarely contain new information. All they contain is motivation, depending on how well it's written. People could substitute it with chatGPT, but its unlikely to provide the same motivation. That's why you could ask chatGPT for the 10 most important lessons in the 4 day workweek, but that won't get you anywhere.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoI disagree. There are a lot of counter intuitive things we’ve learned from psychology, and early childhood development. And I have learned some of them from books or in person training courses that made a difference. Humans have know blocks for their own well being. Most struggle with probabilities or long term planning. But they are teachable skills.
- jhartikainen 3mo agoI've read a bunch of what could be considered "self help" and while they often have a lot of fluff, they do have interesting points. Many of them reference actual research studies to back those points. I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.
- latexr 3mo agoMy recommendation is to find a talk by the author online. It’s free and serves the same purpose.
- failrate 3mo agoIt certainly has killed some people looking to it for self help.
- phantasmat 3mo ago[flagged]
- l23k4 3mo agoI love books, but I could never understand self-help nonfiction books. What's the point? Just about any idea which these books may communicate can be better communicated through fiction. There's no life lessons you'll learn reading self help-books that you won't get by just reading the classics.
- keiferski 3mo agoYes, but only for people that don’t already have an audience. If Famous Athlete/Entrepreneur writes a self-help type book, people will buy it, because the fame lends legitimacy. Even if the book itself is obviously written by AI. With an additional caveat: the person needs to have some real, demonstrable authority. Tim Ferris doesn’t really have authority in the sense of “I am a professional athlete” or “I am billionaire startup founder” does. He does have authority as a podcaster and digital products / books creator, but that isn’t what the 4HWW is about.
- asdaqopqkq 3mo agoLLMs can chew through all the latest in medical research papers, psychological research papers etc. and output better more targeted info for users.
- latexr 3mo agoNo, they can’t, because LLMs cannot detect utter nonsensical bullshit. https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scientific-papers-and-we-traced-it-back-to-a-glitch-in-ai-training-data-254463 https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scien...
- k__ 3mo agoAs I understood it, they were only a US thing anyway. Because of healthcare issues etc.
- schnitzelstoat 3mo agoMost of these non-fiction, non-technical self-help books are just trash. I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.
- AlexKalWork 3mo agoGood riddance, that genre was the slop in literature before AI slop even existed.
- dakolli 3mo agoWow, AI finally did something useful, making Tim Ferris and other grifters obsolete. I actually listened to his most recent podcast and it's wild. These people live in a completely different reality. Remember, Tim Ferris scammed his audience with NFTs lmfao.
- jeffrwells 3mo agoHere I had Claude rewrite his post into a 300 word version without all the filler. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4f45774822cb https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4... Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure version of the information?
- wouldbecouldbe 3mo agoDon't know if you did it on purpose or not, but this is hilarious.
- Boom890 3mo agoThought so too lol
- gb2d_hn 3mo agoSelf help books are the most filler heavy books. They often have a useful point, but they just don't need to be a book much of the time. This is unfortunate for the authors who have often put significant time into producing the information. Technical manuals typically need all of their content due to the level of detail, and novels need all of their content because it's the content which provides enjoyment. For self help, people just want to know what they need to do to make their lives better? Maybe the work has to move into academia where we have existing infrastructure for rewarding non profitable work for the good of the public?
- telesilla 3mo agoI disagree about the filler. People who read self help books are there for the journey, to feel they too can take on the challenge. Otherwise that brief document about how to fix yourself becomes something without substance, that can't be attached to real changes that are needed. The most effective self help books I can recommend are Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which needs all the preamble to get the message to your addicted brain, and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I'd posit that reading just one of his entries doesn't leave you with a lifetime commitment to stoicism.
- ralferoo 3mo agoOh maybe his books are just seen as less relevant now. When times are good, people buy books like "4 hour work week" because they dream of a day when they might not have to work as much. When times are bad, and they face the very real risk of losing their job (if they haven't already), they have more pressing concerns like whether they can afford to buy groceries that week.
- make3 3mo agoThis felt like a vacuous post by a LinkedIn influencer.
- drumhead 3mo agoThere's a misconception about self help books that they teach you "tricks" that you can instantly use to become a completely different person. A lot of the good ones teach you principles that you need to practice constantly to improve. There's hard work and risk taking involved which many people that buy the books are not prepared to do. The first self help book that actually helped me was How to make friends and influence people. It was hard for me to overcome my shyness and look people in the eye and smile, but with constant practice I got better at it. Taking an interest in people or being agreeable these are all basic principles that genuinely good communicators use, the book just points you in the right direction you have to apply the hard work and courage. Good self-help books are rare but they do exist.
- ghtbircshotbe 3mo agoSelf help books definitely have a bad reputation, often with good reason - lots of cliches, preachy, etc. My favorite advice (and central message I think) from "how to win friends" is to really have the other person's interests at heart, not to try to scam or game them. Some of my other favorite self help-ish books - a guide to the good life - thank you for arguing - algorithms to live by
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- wisty 3mo agoIMO the WORST thing you can use chat for is advice in a field you are unfamiliar with. It's way better at search and grunt work when you already know what you want. All IMO: Syncophancy (and in extreme cases AI psychosis) is a huge problem when you take advice from AI. It's risky to learn a new field as you often just fall for a superficial, glib explaination and just nod along without learning. AI will do that because humans will train it to - everyone likes a pop science style easy and fake explaination. OTOH if you just want advice, the AI will need context. Advice is worthless without context. And the AI will use the context to tell you what the dumb human (you) will agree with - that's implicitly what humans want it to do, it's how we will train the AI. I don't see it getting better either - as long as a human in the loop fine tunes the AI, the smarter the AI the better it is at telling the human what the human wants. Scary stuff if a major current use of AI is self help.
- gorfian_robot 3mo agoidk. it helped me fix my washing machine.
- goobatrooba 3mo agoBut that's a concretey very well scoped problem with a clear truth state. Anything mental has none of these properties. Ask an AI if you have depression or another disorder, and keep asking with more details and back and forth, and a few hours later you might be convinced.
- brettermeier 3mo agoAsk that a book... Better?
- thoughtpeddler 3mo agoChiming in here to say that while yes, often AI/LLMs will tend to agree with you, I have also definitely had many (high context) conversations where the AI/LLM disagreed strongly with me. The danger is in people not having a parallel thread running in their mind while using these systems about 'how agreeable is it being with me right now?' as a meta-axis along which to evaluate the information.
- hmontazeri 3mo agoFor me sure I’ll get a summary of a book or some video but that’s more like let me find out if the whole thing is worth my time instead of replacing the medium. Everyone who has read a non fiction book once’s knows it’s not about what the summary alone can teach you.. it’s the story and the learning through pain and reflection
- 999900000999 3mo agoMost self help books are useless if not harmful. Now most are just a 300 page self pitch for some subscription or another product. Most self help books are too general to be useful to anyone. You're writing your own guidebook for an audience of one.
- Hugsbox 3mo agoYep, if AI is killing the self-help book market, all I can say is good riddance.
- Sam6late 3mo agoI think the acquisition of skills need human guidance,AI has created a quality problem making human self-help books more valuable. From a new language to public speaking to media training.Some books need more than structure by AI, that is professional knowledge and real-life experience. AI has a vast information ocean, yet a travel book helped me prepare my underwater kit because WiFi does not work underwater, saving me a lot of money I could have wasted on wireless kit. Take AI apps for teaching languages,Langua is a good example, I think the most successful ones combine human instructors for insights and guidance with AI for drills prescribed and calibrated by the tutor. AI drills are not the same.
- lilerjee 3mo agoIf you work for only 4 hours a week, what practical things could you complete and do you really like the things what you are doing? If you really like to do the things, you will spend many hours on it.
- impostervt 3mo agoThe other way AI is killing self-help nonfiction: people are generating entire self-help books using AI. The human written are always better, but it's impossible to tell from a book cover and short description.
- ChrisRR 3mo ago> The human written are always better I suspect that's not always true. There's so many self help books out there from totally unqualified people that I suspect an AI commingling data from multiple reputable sources may beat some of the most inappropriate books
- llm_nerd 3mo agoWhile it's easy to be cynical and see this as everything getting worse somehow, monetizing a simple idea or premise is tough -- I mean, loads of people just put that stuff out there in comments on social media, blog posts, etc, and move on -- so people fluff it up with endless volumes of filler to justify charging a price for it. Self-help as a domain is absolutely stuffed with this sort of behaviour, where 300 pages just repeat and spin variations on an extremely simple premise, again and again. The reader tags along, sure there's going to be a twist or next level, but in reality it's just trying to justify this being sold as a "book", when at most it could be a single blog entry. And yes, every single one of Tim Ferriss' books follows this principal. Entire books can be condensed into one page summaries and absolutely nothing will be lost. Nothing. In many cases one paragraph. Sometimes a single sentence. This problem afflicts all media. There's a "Glucose Goddess" woman who has made an endless series of videos after she had a book do numbers about reducing glucose spikes. She's spinning four bullet points into endless content and it's just a perfect example. Nothing new or revelatory is being shared, but someone made a whole grifting career on this, all to pitch overpriced vitamins and protein powders. It's actually interesting that someone mentioned YouTube replacing documentaries because people don't have time for that, so to speak, but YouTube is an absolute scourge of time wasting bullshit. I remember years ago one Apple-sphere guy posting a 10 minute video to answer the question "Should you get 8GB or 16GB in your Macbook". Ten minutes of yapping -- apparently ten minutes was the baseline for getting some monetization metric -- and the answer was an unqualified, worthless "get 16GB", because feels or something. YouTube recently added an "Ask" AI button, and it includes generating extremely good summaries of videos. So many videos propose some clickbait headline with a clickbait graphic proposing some novel revelation, and in the first few seconds I've seen the summary, see that they have added absolutely nothing new or of value, and click back. Will these people also post complaints about the drop in viewership about worthless, time inconsiderate content dragging not hitting like it once did? Probably. "Back in my day you could make a career by posting shocked-face thumbnail, a Betteridge's law of headlines question that you promise to answer, and then meander for twenty minutes. Kids these days just don't have the attention span anymore!"
- frgturpwd 3mo agoI agree with everything you are saying, especially as someone whose main goal behind going into content is to understand, and have agreed with it for so long, and in my attempt to understand - ever since I was young - what people get from self-help books, I realized something. I do believe this - our - perspective neglects the difference between reading to "get a complex premise", and reading/watching something simple as some sort of lengthy ritual to get you to marinate on the idea and to allow yourself enough time to "change". Those 300 pages have the benefit of making you "stay with the idea" for however long reading 300 pages takes you, and that's what people who are into self-help like. Being persuaded. That said, a lot of it is really filler.
- jimnotgym 3mo agoHopefully it will kill off the self-help grifters on social media too, all without telling me that if I drink Huel or Athletic Greens I would be a millionaire too
- prmoustache 3mo agoOr maybe it is just a coincidence that people have grown tired of this kind of bullshits. This genre has been trendy for a while already, there had to be a moment people would just collectively realize their life is not measurably better after reading so many of them.
- ura_yukimitsu 3mo agoI'd like to point out the irony of that blog post checking all the boxes of LLM-generated text, and I'm surprised I don't really see anyone talking about it here. Did Tim Ferriss (who's supposed to be an author) use a LLM to write this? If he actually writes like that, perhaps the reason why his sales have gone downhill is that people have noticed they don't need to pay to get the same result.
- criddell 3mo ago[dead]
- mmarian 3mo agoAs an aside, I've been using Claude to search for blog posts from people who went through similar experience to mine. Then use Eleven Readers app which converts the voice to text to listen to it. It's been much better for self therapy vs talking to an LLM.
- sometimez 3mo agoI defininitely read fewer nonfiction books but not because of AI but because I like reading Littler Books.
- amelius 3mo agoI guess soon AI will kill __all__ books. If you can just type "please summarize that book into 1 page", or "make a 30 seconds tiktok format clip summarizing this book".
- ramaseshanms 3mo agoPeople will still own the ideas. The way they are shared is changing yet again. Just like a kindle carried a Book to a user, and LLM with RAG will do as well. Printing books wouldnt make sense anymore except for "Traditionalist who love feeling a crisp page between their fingers"
- red__dragon 3mo agoStill books would disappear, mate.
- Borrible 3mo agoYou can only hope.
- ulfw 3mo agoIs there anything AI will not kill eventually?
- rsynnott 3mo agoSo, not willing to put much time into researching this, but from a quick Google it looks like sales absolutely _exploded_ in the early 10s. This could be AI... or it could just be reversion to the mean as a fad died.
- mglvsky 3mo agoI think, considering length of "self-help content", there is spectrum, and in the both ends of such spectrum there is conflict of interests - audience vs authors. In the first end - short-form content: yt shorts, tiktoks, tweets, ig posts - "authors" have interested to just have more engagement, so we end up with ragebait, fringe ideas, etc - everything for just viewers count go up, the substance doesn't matter at all. In the other end - "long-form" content: books (usually thick ones), writers for some reason need to fill extra content alongside the substance, some off-topic stuff, I'm not professional writer/editor, but I suppose it's protection from some nitpickers, adding some scientific basis to look more solid (don't know why: author can pick any research that support's book idea, even already debunked), maybe there is requierement from publishers, editors, etc. The sweet spot here are thin books here, but even that case they cannot help much, because even a therapy sometimes cannot help for someone (heck, there is a real person trying help, not just text with ideas!)
- randusername 3mo agoSelf-help is 1 part information and 1 part magnetic point-of-view. AI is better at personalized information, short-form content offers a snappier and more "real" point-of-view. What I find most interesting is the appeal to authority aspect. Self-help always has had its gurus. If self-help is getting hit harder than other genres, I wonder what that says about brand trust. EDIT: could also be that these books are kinda fads. I would expect them to have a shelf-life.
- FinnLobsien 3mo agoI think this whole genre is an issue of theory of constraints. -Before the internet, space to publish anything was scarce (and so were methods of finding specific information if it did exist), so newspapers/magazines were valuable and textbooks/guides were great media. It was difficult to find extremely specific information because a lot of information was so niche it wasn't worth publishing, or because it wasn't worth the effort to find something SO specific. -The internet made publishing space infinite and search easy, so specific information became super valuable, e.g. "how to do x in 5 steps" blogs. They architected information in ways that wouldn't have been worth publishing in a regional newspaper or small-circulation magazine, but was economically viable at worldwide scale and when publishing was free. This is the era this article describes. -Then everything went mainstream and the above production of content was often more frequently done by large companies, with bloggers and other individuals filling even smaller niches -Now that LLMs have vacuumed all of that up and you can create even more specific content for free, instantly (e.g. you no longer need a generic tutorial on "how to start a business" but summon one that already knows your prior skills etc.) This has made the previous era of "how-to" content less useful because you can decide whether you want expert/beginner/intermediate level content and what personality etc.) Now the frontier is first-person narratives and opinions, because even specific information is no longer the constraint.
- herf 3mo agoAIs and podcasts (which also grew a lot recently) are free alternatives, and pricing matters as much as attention.
- themythfable 3mo agoBetteridge law [1] > Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff. Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#:~:text=Betteridge's%20law%20of%20headlines%20is,a%20question%2C%20they%20are%20not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- sharadov 3mo agoI think there are more nuggets of wisdom in great fiction than these self help books. Maybe if someone put together a list of fiction books that correlate strongly with self-help categories, it would be immensely useful. A great fiction book helps you vicariously experience a character's life while self-help is an instruction manual which sadly does not provide the same form of connection.
- olooney 3mo agoHaruki Murakami's entire body of work is basically self-therapy[1] and personally I feel it's been very therapeutic. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an excellent place to start. [1]: https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/2022/02/i-always-suspected-that-he-was-more-influenced-by-jungian-psychology-than-he-likes-to-let-on-jonathan-dil-on-haruki-murakami.html https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/2022/02/i-always-s...
- bergie 3mo agoIt has sort of killed books. I'm hesitant to buy anything published after 2022 if I don't know the author. So much slop out there...
- Kyuren 3mo agoYea the shift is right in front of our eyes. It's a "if everyone is super, no one will be" situation. People will simply gravitate towards that with less supply, and that's usually smaller but higher quality content(whatever content means for you whether entertainment or software). The line will split in two ways, some will start making higher quality content which stands out beyond the noise and branching in ways that we've never seen before, and the others will chase the higher but more fraudulent numbers of easily generated content.
- sota_pop 3mo agoSturgeon’s Law abounds. I’ve always found that most books within or similar to Ferris’ genre hold a nice message but are 90 fluff. He picks on summarization as the sort circuit and claims the lived experience imbued within his books is the real draw. Not disagreeing here. LLMs unpack the intentional content stretching rigmarole authors go through as a function of publishers requirements to produce something that is minimally viable to publish. Some seemingly important questions that come to my mind in a future where LLMs, ad-based revenue, and attention-as-currency prevail: how do you create a knowledge-based product valuable/compelling enough to make people want to pay for it? And what is the best value-prop way to monetize it? (For BOTH producer and consumer) Is length a necessary requirement for substantiveness? If so, where on the spectrum of long-content_vs_short-content should it live? Unfortunately, I im not confident the internet can fundamentally diverge from an ad-based or subscription monetization model in its current form. IMO, Michael I Jordan has a lot of refreshing ideas on how to build better marketplaces that sustainably benefit producers and consumers (as opposed to mostly just platform-maintaining-rent-seekers).
- abhishekjiitr 3mo agoIf self-help was just about reading the insights then millions of people would have "won friends and influenced people", and those book summary apps would be billion dollar companies. They'are not Self-help books are absolutely worthless if you don't internalise their insights, practice applying it into your life on a daily basis until it becomes muscle memory, and actually spend time on it. The insight is never actually the bottleneck. AI can surface insights better and faster than any book. But speed is the problem, not the solution. Books are on the contrary slower, and slowness is the point. Without discpline, AI might be a worse choice. For deeper topics, I don't think books are going away anytime soon.