Hard disagree. I have read lots of books, participated in events and training seminars and had profound results in my life. My marriage is better because of what I learned, I am a better father and leader because of what I learned. And the fact that people sell things as part of that growth journey is how they support their ability to share the lessons and techniques.

> 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.

Yeah I got a free medical "coach" and the coaching was sub par, and mostly used to try and press me into non free services.

A lot of those non free services seemed to involve very poorly written and syndicated coaching apps.

I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too.

But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.

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.

Self-help industry is something that literally can't die. It's in the same category as astrology and technical analysis.

Then you could frame the collapse of this writer's book as a 'hit'

A self-help movement worth their reputation is one that sells more than a book. In fact many give away the book and then charge you a sub for being part of a club

Tim Ferris? Bro humanity has invented religion that served exactly this purpose long since before it even invented the wheel.

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

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.

Not to be a contrarian, because I agree for a lot of the industry, but there are some genuine gems out there. Few examples:

Extreme Ownership really helped me be a better leader and take more accountability for my own actions

Atomic Habits really helped me think about goal setting and what the underlying driver was

Coaching Habit improved my 1:1s drastically (I basically stopped talking or advice giving and just listened -- profound, I know, but the book helped smack me in the face with it)

Many more examples, but there is definitely a ton of self-help hack slop out there as well.

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

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.

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

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."

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.

People use LLMs for news?

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.

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.

I like your corner of the internet

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.

A lot of people are functionally illiterate. Those people are online now. We have image, video, and sound based social media for them. They send each other videos and voice messages instead of texts.

Not only that, they're creating content for each other. People who can barely compose an email run TikTok accounts and YouTube channels and podcasts with audiences in the millions.

I don't even know if I think this is a bad thing. Sure, their education system failed them, but they need to know how to do things, and they often have information worth sharing. Providing video tutorials almost becomes a question of accessibility (in the a11y sense) in some contexts.

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.

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.

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.

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

> Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?

Which one is more likely to result in more ad revenue for you?

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.

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

>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.

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

>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.

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

>Why? I don't get it

Because articles make no money?

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.

Text is not cheaper to produce. Most people can type out a lot of drivel but something worth reading takes practice and talent to write.

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

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.

I'd like to think people will continue to read because reading is an inherently pleasurable activity, and because the medium captures nuance that can't be replicated in video.

However, the loss of reading self-help books surely will hurt no-one. It is an ill wind, etc ...

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

"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.

"Luke… I am your father."

"…You're absolutely right!"

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).

I think the more salient points for the paywalls is people want pay once access everything, instead of piecemeal. I would certainly be happy to subscribe to "news" in general, but not a dozen different providers for one article apiece.

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.

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.

The art of war is probably fictional.

“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho qualifies.

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