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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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

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