The author is indeed talking about non-fiction books, but, more specifically, a genre of books that I call "airport books". These are mass-market self-help, HBR fanfic, blogposts, that are bound and sold as books.
There's a whole higher echelon of non-fiction books that are more like academic books targeting a learned mass culture. These are often academic books with all or most of the footnotes and citations shaved off. Or they're just incredibly well written non-fiction storytelling, like the books of David McCullough, to give one example. Another: the essays by Mark Grief (even his one academic monograph is a stellar read by the standards of academic writing).
Because we have too many books already, and publishing as a status play pollutes the information environment.
Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries. The "too many books" argument runs into, I believe, an unspoken desire by the writer. Eventually you begin to notice what's worth reading and what isn't. You begin to trust certain publishers and writers over others. You begin to cultivate your own tastes and filter. Sometimes, you also just want a syllabus that lays out the "major works" in a field for you. Sometimes you want to find that out for yourself. Which is all to say, this writer seems to be asking for only something like Wikipedia or fiction, with non-fiction books dissolved and absorbed into the former. But one of the best parts of non-fiction writing is the author's point of view, their personality, their voice.
> Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries.
Amen. The vast majority of the text that was printed in the first few hundred years of the printing press was garbage mass market paper backs just like these. We have entire bibliographies and printers for whom not a single work survived because it was all worthless. Instead of self help, the most popular categories were translations of the classic canon and King Arthur and Knights of the Roundtable fiction.
See also: music. I often hear people express how much better music in the past was than the music of today usually to compare Led Zeppelin to Ice Spice[0] or whatever. They don't take into account the survivorship bias that the music we collectively remember (often through the aid of curators/arbiters) is going to be the stuff that was at the right intersection of good enough (or at least relevant enough to modern tastes) and popular enough to persist in the cultural record: if you want to understand what the vast majority of popular music was like "back when music was good," go to any crusty old record store and look at the shelf underneath the main shelf with all the $0.25 records: total garbage, typically bland and completely stultifying to any passion. Much like the worthless print matter that never survived, this is the stuff that never even made it onto any digital record anywhere and probably even had the master tapes wiped once it was on wax.
[0]Typically the "contemporary" example used is going to be something already a little aged like Nicki Minaj or even Britney Spears or any of the Pearlman-era boy bands who all peaked 25 years ago. Here I use someone actually recent to evade accusations that I am as out-of-touch as the target of criticism here.
The author explicitly says they're talking about this genre. From TFA: "By 'non-fiction' I mean mass-market non-fiction, those paperbacks with titles like 'Sleep: Why We Need It, And Why We Don’t Get Enough of It'. Textbooks and technical books are a separate category." I see at least three categories - mass-market, textbooks/technical, and your "higher echelon".
I think what you call "higher echelon" are just vulgarization books written by academics.
A fun example is in physics, the "Feynman" literature. Because of all the published stuff, you have only his lecture that are actually authored by him (and two co-authors, he was the speaker but by no mean the only expert involved). Lot of the books are just anaecdata or just people trying to remember discussion they had with him, and two are based on a biograph work, except he wasn't a biograph so in my country, he would probably have received pushback.
The only feynman book i would call "higher echelon" are his published public lectures. Even his biography i would consider an "airport book" (interestingly enough, i have found that book at an airport 10 years ago while visiting the western US). Still, his biography is a hundred time better than random slop written (and now probably AI-hallucinated) about him by people who met him once, and is still very interesting.
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The author is indeed talking about non-fiction books, but, more specifically, a genre of books that I call "airport books". These are mass-market self-help, HBR fanfic, blogposts, that are bound and sold as books.
There's a whole higher echelon of non-fiction books that are more like academic books targeting a learned mass culture. These are often academic books with all or most of the footnotes and citations shaved off. Or they're just incredibly well written non-fiction storytelling, like the books of David McCullough, to give one example. Another: the essays by Mark Grief (even his one academic monograph is a stellar read by the standards of academic writing).
Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries. The "too many books" argument runs into, I believe, an unspoken desire by the writer. Eventually you begin to notice what's worth reading and what isn't. You begin to trust certain publishers and writers over others. You begin to cultivate your own tastes and filter. Sometimes, you also just want a syllabus that lays out the "major works" in a field for you. Sometimes you want to find that out for yourself. Which is all to say, this writer seems to be asking for only something like Wikipedia or fiction, with non-fiction books dissolved and absorbed into the former. But one of the best parts of non-fiction writing is the author's point of view, their personality, their voice.
> Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries.
Amen. The vast majority of the text that was printed in the first few hundred years of the printing press was garbage mass market paper backs just like these. We have entire bibliographies and printers for whom not a single work survived because it was all worthless. Instead of self help, the most popular categories were translations of the classic canon and King Arthur and Knights of the Roundtable fiction.
See also: music. I often hear people express how much better music in the past was than the music of today usually to compare Led Zeppelin to Ice Spice[0] or whatever. They don't take into account the survivorship bias that the music we collectively remember (often through the aid of curators/arbiters) is going to be the stuff that was at the right intersection of good enough (or at least relevant enough to modern tastes) and popular enough to persist in the cultural record: if you want to understand what the vast majority of popular music was like "back when music was good," go to any crusty old record store and look at the shelf underneath the main shelf with all the $0.25 records: total garbage, typically bland and completely stultifying to any passion. Much like the worthless print matter that never survived, this is the stuff that never even made it onto any digital record anywhere and probably even had the master tapes wiped once it was on wax.
[0]Typically the "contemporary" example used is going to be something already a little aged like Nicki Minaj or even Britney Spears or any of the Pearlman-era boy bands who all peaked 25 years ago. Here I use someone actually recent to evade accusations that I am as out-of-touch as the target of criticism here.
The author explicitly says they're talking about this genre. From TFA: "By 'non-fiction' I mean mass-market non-fiction, those paperbacks with titles like 'Sleep: Why We Need It, And Why We Don’t Get Enough of It'. Textbooks and technical books are a separate category." I see at least three categories - mass-market, textbooks/technical, and your "higher echelon".
I think what you call "higher echelon" are just vulgarization books written by academics.
A fun example is in physics, the "Feynman" literature. Because of all the published stuff, you have only his lecture that are actually authored by him (and two co-authors, he was the speaker but by no mean the only expert involved). Lot of the books are just anaecdata or just people trying to remember discussion they had with him, and two are based on a biograph work, except he wasn't a biograph so in my country, he would probably have received pushback.
The only feynman book i would call "higher echelon" are his published public lectures. Even his biography i would consider an "airport book" (interestingly enough, i have found that book at an airport 10 years ago while visiting the western US). Still, his biography is a hundred time better than random slop written (and now probably AI-hallucinated) about him by people who met him once, and is still very interesting.