Why now though? Based on the sharp decline since 2022 (according to Ferris’s numbers), s/books/chatbots seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation here.

Also personally, my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately. Part of it is that quality of content has been worsening over the years. But the part that’s put me off the most is the general burnout I’m facing in life: professional stagnation, uncertain future (will I be employed in a year?), more work, financial pressure, politics upending my life directly etc. Funnily enough I’ve started consuming more content around hobbies, crafts and other fun stuff, which the blog mentions was one of the only two categories that saw growth in sales.

I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.

> it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products

I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry

Dale Carnegie created it, Tim Ferriss is a century too late to point as origin.

you've giving people way too much credit here. People never start to realise en-masse.

Self help is just education from a book rather than from an in person instructor.

I would be extremely surprised if piracy accounts for any serious dent in the sales of books.

How 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)

And 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.

Even 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.

followers 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.

depending 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.

With a book you cannot do "that's not what I wanted to read, I'll adjust the prompt."

The right 15 seconds of video can be extremely helpful with household tasks. I'm thinking specifically of super-tactile ones like getting such-and-such panel off the car or appliance so that you can get at the bit you're looking to replace. Those can really be worth a thousand words.

Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.

It's because you get better ad rates on Youtube than if you made a website and posted the information there. Additionally, the current state of the web (Google only exposing SEO blogspam, AI overviews making it so ~60% of searches end without the user clicking on a site) pushes people further and further away from making websites.

Being 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.

It's the money that comes from getting people to watch ads, generally speaking. If people write an article, even if it blows up all over the internet, nothing happens. If they make a little shitty short that appeals to kids, with a thumbnail where they make a stupid face, they get a a chunk of actual money. I imagine it's real hard to not get influenced by that.

But as understandable as it may be, a clown whose job is to keep people entertained until the ad break can talk about a lot of things, but cannot be something else. This clown talks about math, the other one just rubs the microphone over materials and then says "smash that like button", but they all have the same purpose and can only differentiate themselves by how much engagement they create. The platform is the payload, the content is whatever.

Isn't it obvious? The creator gets paid much more, in whatever currency they care about:

- ad revenue - youtube algorithm placement - sponsored content - street cred

With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.

One 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

There can be a lot to gain from the graphics and audio, depending on the topic.

A certain portion of people just prefer learning from video instead of text.

>Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos

a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.

It's a mixed bag. When you're (for example) repairing a lawnmower, being able to see parts from different angles and hear what it sounds like is very useful.

When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.

>Why? I don't get it

Because articles make no money?

>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

I wonder why not write an article for people with correct information. Then have the LLM create 5 articles with slightly wrong information with generated plausible URLs.

Yeah since most are visual learners. Of course reading is quicker.

YouTube handles distribution. Some people search for information by typing their question in the YouTube search box. Whatever article you wrote won't surface there. You have to post to many social media sites if you want to show up everywhere people are looking.

It’s because large fractions of internet users today are functionally illiterate and can’t follow an article.

It 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.

All 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.

The article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.

Conversely: 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

The 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.

You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.

"Luke… I am your father."

"…You're absolutely right!"

"Self-help nonfiction" have always been a waste of paper. And honestly, most of the time I hear "X was replaced by AI" I find myself thinking "good riddance, but we could drop X altogether and not loose anything of value."

Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.

Finally AI-skeptics found something positive

This 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.

To 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).

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, I suppose also the business-parable style books like Who Moved My Cheese?.

Pretty much all of them.

The art of war is probably fictional.

I've never read it but I think Atlas Shrugged might qualify. I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise the plot or talk about it as a novel, instead people who liked it say it changed their life, changed how they view themselves, etc.

Yes! plenty of them: The Secret, The 4-hour Work Week, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, etc…

“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho qualifies.