alt Hacker NewsHas AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
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I'm going to admit that I tend to hit a brick wall when these books tell me I need to fill out a worksheet if I really want to make a difference. You're telling me I have to do homework now? But ai can give me feedback on my thoughts anyway, directly what I'm interested in, and provide sources, even though it's probably patronizing me? Not a difficult decision.
Something not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive
This stat is limited to print-books only. He talks about all sorts of other forms of content, but seems to mysteriously miss audio books.
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 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
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)
self help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.
> 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.
> How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?
Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:
- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)
- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need
- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)
- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)
- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
I never understood how anyone could write more than 40 pages of “self help”. Especially not for a general audience. All self help boils down to the very foundation of your worldview, all other advice stems from it.
Fiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful to the source, except as required by my_movie_preferences.md". Reading the text may become as rare as learning ancient Greek to read the Odyssey.
Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.
Grifter publishing-slop sector devastated by slop automation.
I suspect AI is replacing my need for productivity content much faster than it’s replacing my need for books.
I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago.
But I still buy books.
The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
>But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.
Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
> [the numbers]
> Let that sink in for a minute.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
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I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
has bruv updated said book to include tips on using AI to automate?
> What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.
You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.
Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
Makes sense. Self-help books are kinda the human slop of the publishing business. Easily replaced by AI slop? Probably.
Betteridge's law of headlines applies. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Why would anyone ask AI?
everyone has their own contribution to this observation
but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?
that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest
its the law of diminishing returns
this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified
but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
unfortunately, as a reader, I am not buying any books post-ChatGPT era. Author maybe did their best, but it anyways feels like I will be buying ChatGPT's opinion
In my corner of the internet people started to recommend reading fiction rather than self-help. Books like the count of montecristo for example, where the characters overcome through perseverance, patience and planning.
The criticism of self-help books in my little internet bubble is that if you've read one you've read them all. So why not go for works of fiction that are time-tested and are greatly entertaining and nourishing?
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.