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  • When I saw the literature lists my sons got from school for reading, I was not surprized boys get turned of on reading at a young age. With education being this feminized ( I think over here >95% of k12 teachers are now female, and 70-80% of high school), I do not even know they even see how unappealing and biased the selection is for the average young male.
    by PeterStuer
  • One thing I've learned listening to Monocle podcasts is that non-fiction writers have to hustle a lot to be successful. Many of their regular guests are non-fiction writers and they are constantly talking about what conference they just came back from, what workshops they've been running, etc. And part of this hustling is appearing in Monocle podcasts and news programs.
    by comrade1234
  • Absolutely crazy and useless article IMO in that they never mention AI.

    They cite readers being interested in learning - well what's the best way to do so nowadays? Ask ChatGPT.

    Even worse, you can ask ChatGPT to describe the learnings of any reasonably popular nonfiction book directly. No it's not a perfect substitute, nor will the learnings be as memorable, but it's reasonably good enough. That's why I haven't bought a nonfiction book in a long time.

    by personjerry
  • Lately whenever I enter a book store in Italy, I'm overwhelmed by the amount of fiction romance for girls and womens. I get 3/4 of readers are womens but all I'm left with is a gigantic pile of nonfiction shit I'm not interested about, I know for sure most of it will leave nothing to me. Increasingly way too many people attempted to sell a bunch of nonfiction books, and it shows there amounts of unsold copies. Most of them being a marketing political campaign. There gems for sure but it's becoming increasingly harder to find them. Also the only fiction books I'm interested about are sci-fi, and the dedicated space is soo small that you feel a weirdo with strange hobbies. But I swear to you, cause I read a fantasy novel from my wife's selection, that a saga like The Expanse is 100 times better written than all that new shit. Finally rest of the book store is now dedicated to manga and graphic novels. Not bad I love them but the ratio is overwhelming as well
    by hollowturtle
  • For the last couple of years I’ve only read non fiction. For me reading about real life events is far more entertaining and also a great learning experience that I can’t get from a fiction book.
    by rukshn
  • I started reading and at about the half-way point, I decided to search for "AI", "LLM", "generative", which all came up blank. At that point I closed the tab and headed back here. #1 reason I would be very skeptical of purchasing a book published in 2026 is AI. Unfortunately, you need to overcome a pretty big hump in convincing me that there was no AI involved in authoring.
    by Jblx2
  • What is their source that the non-fiction book market is collapsing? Their entire premise seems to come down to the fact that non-fiction in 2025 took a smaller share of the top 25 best-selling, hardcover books compared to 2015. It's baffling enough to draw any conclusions from the top 25 of anything, but then to narrow down to hardcover disregards any confounding effects of preferences in format. On top of that they seem to be strangely unaware of this whole phenomenon called ebooks that has been taking the market over by storm.

    Besides, non-fiction isn't analogous to fiction, it's not a useful category even. The subset of people who may read biographies may be very different from those who may read popular science or those who read self-help. There is no common denominator encompassing all of these other than the fact that it is a written medium. Fiction is different this way that it is a creative expression often read for the sake of reading and the point is not so much to reach the end. What would be more useful to see is the trend of specific categories of non-fiction over time and which ones are growing and which ones are not.

    Perhaps in some ironic way, this article demonstrates why interest in non-fiction may be declining. When you take a singular, weak data point and stretch it over 5 pages saying the same thing, to create a complete non-issue over something that concludes nothing of significance by the end, you have to wonder if one would want to read more of such spiel.

    by potamic
  • 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...

    by nicbou

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