The Broken Incentives of Mass-Market Non-Fiction
2025-02-11
Most mass-market non-fiction books prioritize authorial status and intellectual legitimacy over genuine knowledge dissemination. Authors focus on press tours, interviews, and reviews rather than the book's actual content. This misalignment of incentives leads to a flood of verbose, low-value books polluting the information environment. Readers crave concise, useful essays, not 200-page expansions of a single idea.