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- Hacker News
- I 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.
by FinnLobsien - Couple 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.
by alanb99 - Executive 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.
by prepend - > 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.
by latexr - > 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.
by _pdp_ - 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.by Quarrelsome
- With a book you cannot do "that's not what I wanted to read, I'll adjust the prompt."by plagiarist
- 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.
- > 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!
by geraneum - Yes, I'd be interested in seeing this compared to book sales in general.
- Weirdly 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...by Ekaros
- I 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.by throwawaypub
- People use LLMs for news?by Panzer04
- How is the email newsletter business/department doing? Are people opening/engaging with your emails or that's declining too?by karakoram
- What do the AI vendors think is going to happen when the content creation ecosystem drops off a cliff? Do they realize they will drop with them?
We are heading for a future where the internet is frozen in time with a cutoff date created when the LLM summaries started.
by digitaltrees - I 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.
- Came here to say the same thing. How could the author possibly illustrate the point of the book without at least 4 case studies and a reference to prehistoric humans?by timwis
- Or 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.by Gigachad
- Some of the best books on JS which were online went recently off-line for that reason. Blog post by the author: https://2ality.com/ (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer)by heisenbit
- This makes me indescribably sad. Dr. Rauschmayer's books and articles helped me tremendously early in my career. I owe him a debt of gratitude.by duckfruit
- I 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.
- > 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.
by cryptonym - 4 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.
by uberex - Perhaps, but them how do you explain the claimed pattern that sales had been unusually consistent until just recently?by m0llusk
- This is a brilliant summary. I recall following Michael Lynch's journey while he built TinyPilot (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!
- You can summarize any “self-help” books which I read in single pages. And most of them even in a few sentences without loosing any information from them.
One of the first which I’ve ever read fully was Getting Things Done after a Lifehacker article eons ago. The book had zero additional information compared to the article. Back then I didn’t know that these books information density was almost zero, and still is.
Last year I bought a book about eating well. I could read only the first half, because it repeated until then basically a single mantra: eat fermented and macronutrient rich food. This was repeated different ways, without adding anything to this summary. Sometimes literally the same sentences. Reasons were not provided, or was on the level “I knew somebody whom this helped”, without even trying to convince me that it was really this what helped them, and not anything else.
The dietary guidelines from the US is a way better read, and that’s free. Even the current, clearly politically distorted one.
Maybe, that’s the main reason. Free information is better or at least good enough. I haven’t learned anything from these kinds of books which was not available freely (and legally… because you can obviously get almost any books illegally).
by ruszki - IMO 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.
by wisty - idk. it helped me fix my washing machine.
- Chiming 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.
- Here I had Claude rewrite his post into a 300 word version without all the filler.
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?
by jeffrwells