Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?

https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/

by imakwana • 1 month ago

422 489 1 month ago

Finnucane• 1 month ago

Makes sense. Self-help books are kinda the human slop of the publishing business. Easily replaced by AI slop? Probably.

cjs_ac• 1 month ago

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).

xracy• 1 month ago

also assuming there's signal in that noise...

dvh• 1 month ago

Now I'm curious, were there any self-help fiction books?

comrade1234• 1 month ago

Pretty much all of them.

tonymet2• 1 month ago

perhaps they made the fiction/non-fiction Freudian slip? Here I was thinking "Are there any non-fiction (actually true) self help books?"

deadbabe• 1 month ago

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

PaulHoule4• 1 month ago

I think there are some good things in the 4-hour Work Week but the concept as a whole is problematic: e.g. Tim Ferris himself has more like a 400-hour work week. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam. There is a psychotechnology that people call "magic" but The Secret and Think and Grow Rich won't teach you it.

threetonesun2• 1 month ago

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

Insanity• 1 month ago

If you count Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, almost any fiction book with a philosophical angle would fit that description.

Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.

burkaman• 1 month ago

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.

citizenpaul• 1 month ago

I think it appeals to people with toxic "lone wolf" mentality.

PaulHoule4• 1 month ago

I thought it was pretty well paced as a novel until it got to John Galt's big speech which seemed childishly self-indulgent and then after that it goes to hell. The novel is about 1200 pages and it's pretty amazing that it held my attention for the first 800 because I've rarely been able to enjoy a novel for that long.

randthrowaway3• 1 month ago

as a lite-BDSM wish fulfillment romance novel, it's quite compelling. better plotted and written than much successful romantasy today. the whole plot is about a bunch of hot rich guys fighting over who gets to dom the self-insert female protagonist.

there's another fantasy aspect, which is discovering your sense of alienation from family and society is really because you're part of a special but oppressed group and won't admit it to yourself, and once you embrace your identity you can find fulfillment, love, and community.

now, in this case, the repressed identity is "capitalist", which is a peculiar way of looking at the world. but if you ignore this, the emotional beats of the story (finding yourself, coming out, found family) also work for the LGBT experience, even perhaps neurodivergence. I think this is why so many confused teenagers find themselves very moved by the book and are later embarrassed to admit it.

on the whole, it's not high literature but competently executed, the only really stupid thing about it is Objectivism.

a-french-anon• 1 month ago

Huh, if this is what we're talking about, I think Starship Troopers may qualify.

RobotToaster• 1 month ago

The art of war is probably fictional.

mcphage• 1 month ago

“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho qualifies.

wps• 1 month ago

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.

mrweasel• 1 month ago

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.

beej712• 1 month ago

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.

ghaff3• 1 month ago

A lot of non-fiction fits in 50-100 pages or so. Longer than a magazine article. But it's not publishable through a publisher if it's less than 250-300 pages. One of the reasons I probably won't work through a publisher any longer.

SkyPuncher• 1 month ago

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).

[0] https://electroiq.com/stats/audiobook-statistics/

losteric• 1 month ago

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)

EA-3167• 1 month ago

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.

ghaff3• 1 month ago

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.

nfcampos3• 1 month ago

He does mention audiobooks, see quoted below

But what about ebooks and audio? Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.

This compares to 46% on print only

vova_hn23• 1 month ago

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.

sigmoid10• 1 month ago

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.

coldtea• 1 month ago

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

seanw444• 1 month ago

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

twright• 1 month ago

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

jpieper• 1 month ago

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.

ndiddy• 1 month ago

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.

neutronicus• 1 month ago

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.

mathgeek• 1 month ago

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.

This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.

odysseus• 1 month ago

Yep, for home improvement and work on cars, I’ll take the video every time. Everything else, if only a video is available, I’ll ask Grok to summarize it so I don’t have to sit through it.

But last weekend I had to remove a trim panel under the hood of my car to extract a dead rodent, and I was wondering how to get those round clips off without breaking them. This video helped: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rsVDj5s1o&ra=m

The AI summary of the same video explains the exact steps but doesn’t show them actually being done.

RajT882• 1 month ago

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.

eggplantemoji69• 1 month ago

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

rayiner• 1 month ago

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

Larrikin• 1 month ago

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.

mrheosuper• 1 month ago

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.

cm2012• 1 month ago

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

Apocryphon• 1 month ago

And audio. This also explains the popularity of podcasts, the descendants of a century or so of radio shows.

charcircuit• 1 month ago

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.

Jtarii• 1 month ago

Why? I don't get it

Because articles make no money?

customguy• 1 month ago

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.

jeffbee• 1 month ago

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.

egypturnash• 1 month ago

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?

hamdingers• 1 month ago

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.

newtwentysix• 1 month ago

Because, money. Nothing else.

xnx• 1 month ago

text is much quicker and cheaper to produce

I agree that a huge percent of 10+ minute YouTube videos would be better off as a few sentences and a bulleted list.

The success of YouTube and TikTok has shown that video is by far the easiest way for the average person to share whatever they know and have a chance of getting it seen. Where would the average person even post a article?

vova_hn23• 1 month ago

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?

Panzer042• 1 month ago

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.

vova_hn23• 1 month ago

Hmmm, "Spotify for news" that collects subscriptions and distributes them proportionally to articles clicked/read or whatever can be a viable business model.

_pdp_2• 1 month ago

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.

bryanrasmussen• 1 month ago

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.

plagiarist2• 1 month ago

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

Quarrelsome2• 1 month ago

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.

_pdp_2• 1 month ago

That is a better frame of mind - it is not 1000 true fans but a 1000 customers.

delichon• 1 month ago

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.

aerhardt• 1 month ago

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

ryandrake• 1 month ago

I wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me.

Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?

ben_w3• 1 month ago

It may not yet be fully automated, and you may have to choose between "cheap and bad or the price of a house and kinda acceptable", but it's definitely possible.

tliltocatl• 1 month ago

"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.

yakshaving_jgt• 1 month ago

"Luke… I am your father."

"…You're absolutely right!"

shermantanktop• 1 month ago

c'mon, spoiler alert, jeez

epihelix2• 1 month ago

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 ...

malloryerik• 1 month ago

Of course it's possible, but reading and watching fiction feel very different and can you see a way to change that? The word may continue to decline compared to image. But the image is soon to become nearly as cheap and hackable as the word.

runako2• 1 month ago

This may well happen, but the fraction of people still capable of absorbing original texts will have a tremendous advantage over people who never learned to think.

formvoltron• 1 month ago

has bruv updated said book to include tips on using AI to automate?

operatingthetan• 1 month ago

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.

josefritzishere• 1 month ago

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?

submeta• 1 month ago

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.

the_lonely_phon• 1 month ago

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.

__alexander• 1 month ago

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.

curuinor2• 1 month ago

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

ransom1538• 1 month ago

Dale Carnegie -> Jim Rohn -> Tony Robbins -> [all hacks now]

lanamo• 1 month ago

Or you could say in other words: Everything is a remix!

Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey have both been heavily influenced by Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology.

senordevnyc4• 1 month ago

Why can’t you go back to things like Meditations? Or Proverbs in the Old Testament?

It’s almost like the designation of “self help” is so broad as to be totally useless.

wang_li• 1 month ago

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

Quarrelsome2• 1 month ago

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

an0malous• 1 month ago

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

watwut• 1 month ago

The sooner people realize that, the better.

gdhkgdhkvff• 1 month ago

Considering he named it “the Tim Ferris mafia” makes me think he’s fully aware of that.

darth_avocado• 1 month ago

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.

throwaway20377• 1 month ago

    > my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately

I want to propose an alternative theory about why your viewership is dropping. Whatever made you originally watch self-help on a particular topic is no longer as interesting. Let's say you were struggling with (a) exercise/fitness/diet, (b) personal/romantic relationships, or (c) business/"success"/wealth. (These are easily the three biggest categories for self-help.) You watched a few hundred hours of self-help YouTube videos over a few years and you learned how to improve. Now, the content is less interesting.

I share this idea because I see a similar pattern in myself. For the self-help YouTube videos that I do watch, I am/was most interested in (a) exercise/fitness/diet and (b) personal/romantic relationships. After 1000 hours or so of this sort of content, I learned how to improve and "ascended". Now, I don't need to watch as much because my thinking on these topics is more advanced.

Deeper: How will these channels sustain themselves? It does not look obvious to me! If I were running a self-help channel, I might intentionally delete old videos after 6-12 months. Why? So that I can remake the same content again (and again)... to get a revenue boost from new(er) viewers. For anyone who is a full-time self-help content creator, probably 90% of the revenue is made in the first 30 days. (Wild guess, but there will be an extreme cliff of some sort.)

mmahemoff• 1 month ago

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.

digitaltrees37• 1 month ago

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.

JumpCrisscross• 1 month ago

Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?

breezybottom4• 1 month ago

Well grifters can also be marks. It sounds like you're both.

jasonfarnon2• 1 month ago

"because of what I learned." Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I always figured they were more about coaching, persuasion, convincing. To the extent I've scanned them, I never saw any kind of new fact, definitely not about something like being married.

dartharva3• 1 month ago

Pretty sure that's a result of the larger gestalt driven more by your own drive and savviness to seek new ideas on living than the books themselves, as it is for everyone who claims to have benefited. If the books are gone today and only LLMs remain, nothing will change in this front.

keybored6• 1 month ago

I reach for my revolver when someone says that they are a better leader. That might mean that they have a captive audience of sycophants.

The outdated sense of leader of the willingly lead is a different matter.

Npovview• 1 month ago

I agree with you. Self-help industry has evolved to cover lot of nuanced topics. Depression, anxiety adjacent topics. Once the basics are recognized, the other aspects like what to expect when you grow old. what to expect after retirement etc.

How to care less about what other people think, but in a healthy way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uyR_cXGBMY

toasty228• 1 month ago

You know it's a cult when you can't tell if it's an erowid LSD trip report conclusion or a comment about the self-help community

ubercore• 1 month ago

Willing to bet the fact that you went looking to improve is the thing that made the difference, not anything you learned from those seminars.

myaccountonhn• 1 month ago

Self-help books are so often ridiculued, and that ridicule is often well merited. At the same time there was a self-help book that basically gave me a whole different outlook on life, and cured my depression over night. So I can't deny they have a place and can really help people.

ChrisRR2• 1 month ago

There are no doubt a lot of good self-help books out there. But there's very likely way more crap ones out there from armchair psychologists

alberto467• 1 month ago

Exactly. People have just been told that there are some grifters in the field and they're unable to make the mental effort to not lump the entire field together.

Oh and the fact they're making money? Yeah everybody has to eat, psychologists don't work for free either, neither does any doctor for that matter. There are people doing good out there and yes they will charge you plenty of money for it.

paulryanrogers• 1 month ago

Self-help parenting books and blogs caused my spouse years of anguish and disappointment because most declare they've found the one true way. It just so happens to be the least productive and incompatible with many readers' children, bodies, minds, etc.

Many of the authors are selling their narrow experience as if it's divine revelation, often literally because they're religious. The grift usually continues with sponsorships, plugging their other books (or their friends' books), or seminars.

I've read enough about sociology and psychology now that the whole self help industry disgusts me. Receiving such books or recommendations unsolicited strikes me as an insult from folks to naive or lazy to really get to know me first.

vld_chk• 1 month ago

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.

mcmoor• 1 month ago

I'm curious how correlated they are to decline of books in general

throwaway20377• 1 month ago

Your comment gave me an idea. First, start with this assumption: Self-help is "someone trying to sell an idea that may improve your life (health, business/wealth, relationships)". Second, consider the mediums that we use to sell self-help. Traditionally, it was in-person/live events. Basically, 100 to 1000 people sit in a big room and listen to a person talk on stage. Usually, there is some Q&A, raise your hands for voting, etc. Now think about the revenue side: How do you scale that business? Publish a book with the same ideas. The in-person events create a personal brand, and books help you scale the business.

Next, consider the mediums for selling self-help: (1) in-person events, (2) books, (3) YouTube. (1) scales the least, but has the highest branding building effect. (2) scales medium, because it costs money for the customer to buy the book. (3) scales infinitely, because it is nearly free. Further, the most financially successful YouTubers first build a personal brand, then begin sell product placement by sponsorships. Further, they also begin selling "merch" (channel merchandise). That is the real gold mine of YouTube. Even sponsonships for most channels with less than one million subscribers pales in comparison to selling "merch".

About (1) (2) and (3) above, I would say that humans are usually more influenced by [the most] (1) seeing a person live, [next most] (3) seeing a person on video, and [the least] (2) reading their book. Thus, it seems logical that YouTube will replace books for self-help.

Without reading the article, my first instinct (after writing the above) is that self-help books are not being replaced with AI/LLMs. Instead, they are being replaced by self-help YouTube channels.

raincole• 1 month ago

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

627467• 1 month ago

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

protocolture• 1 month ago

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.

tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm• 1 month ago

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

dimitrios1• 1 month ago

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.

digitaltrees37• 1 month ago

Totally agree. So many people talk when they should listen.

nephihaha5• 1 month ago

I'd agree with that. A lot of rubbish is out there, but there are some helpful things. Even the Law of Attraction can be helpful if viewed through the lens of positive thinking (i.e. you can handle bad situations better if you are in a good frame of mind which will make your life better.)

dartharva3• 1 month ago

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

enos_feedler• 1 month ago

Unless you have hard proof this is occurring then I would rather believe my own and others positive testimony on self help. Its powerful and relatively affordable if you are committed to making changes in your own life. Is good advice. Authentic stories (generally). I am just grateful that people take the time and effort to reflect and encode their experience into something digestible by others. It’s pretty cynical to have your view.

1-6• 1 month ago

OP is describing Dave Ramsey

mannanj• 1 month ago

this self help industry completely reversed my diabetes, brought my adventure and satisfaction, and let me to making the best friends of my life.

maybe you are judging and dismissing something with prejudice?

kdheiwns• 1 month ago

Every time someone has said some goofy thing will go away because people are getting smarter or realizing something, it's absolutely not the case. A large number of people will always want someone to tell them that they have everything figured out and others just don't see how great they are, that they'll wake up rich and famous one day, that they're powerful, that they're beautiful, etc. Many will pay to be told this. Many will pay for subscriptions to become even bigger and better.

As an extreme example, pickup artists had a wave of success a few years back and people paid big money for those ridiculous courses. They got replaced with Andrew Tate style "a real man just smokes and fights and hates women" type content and people paid money with the hopes of becoming like them. Trends and life goals change, but people still gobble up self help.

JimsonYang• 1 month ago

agree, there's always going to be a belief for a majority of people that by reading or doing this ONE trick, they can avoid the hard work and sacrifice needed to get to a place/do a task

we've seen it with exercise/dieting we've seen it with women/dating this types of things always persist

vidarh4• 1 month ago

I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a hair shy of more mainstream selfhelp of making yourself better to be more attractive. On the extreme end you'd see NLP, hypnosis and in some cases coaches trying to legitimise things that'd easily cross into assault. On the "near mainstream" end you'd see people pushing meditation, exercise, and mainstream authors on getting better at social situations (e.g. Dale Carnegie).

The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out.

I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.

carlosjobim• 1 month ago

How is the bucket, Mr Crab? Personally I admire all people who want to improve themselves, or crawl out of a hole, or fix their issues. It's not easy, and it's not easy to find the right advice or help.

rapidfl2• 1 month ago

This is a good point. If there was timeless material, they would continue to sell. Maybe War of Art or Meditations still continue to sell. Deep Work is a joke.

throwaway27448• 1 month ago

Is this really a new revelation?

Anyway, "self help" is still one of the largest sections at my local barnes and noble—certainly by far the largest non-fiction section.

throwaway20377• 1 month ago

    > starting to realize

You think people didn't know the same in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 00s, etc? Related: Every single diet fad in the last 50 years (except GLP-1) did not work. Yet, many people continue to buy into every new diet fad.

Razengan• 1 month ago

the self-help industry

About 15 years ago my friend showed me this video of a "self-help" guy he was impressed with and inspired by.

..it was over 30 minutes of rambling that sounded like it makes senses but meant nothing and lead nowhere.

Looking back it was like listening to how early LLMs were: Just long strings of random words and vague sentences without actually saying anything.

Or how Saruman's power of the tongue was described as.

It's depressing and obvious to see how many people could be misled by this kind of charlatanism.

AI if done right could cut a lot of crap from human society.

teekert• 1 month ago

Yeah, there is just too much Tony Robbins referring to cells living of light in some jar linked directly to your work productivity (and thousands of other debunked BS "facts"). The levels of coaches for coaches for coaches for coaches on LinkedIn is approaching levels that shouldn't even be possible. I feel like almost everything about this topic has been said, but the amount of things being said is increasing exponentially, and it's all coming out of thin air. Like an LLM expanding the current body of work.

I for one used to enjoy such books but have turned more to mind-fuck scifi (i.e. I keep hunting for the Ted Chiang level books, although they are also very rare). I find meaning in those.

ElProlactin• 1 month ago

If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?

- George Carlin

mettamage8• 1 month ago

For real? Because certain people might know things about the way the world works that could help you?

arethuza• 1 month ago

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

That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?

thomassmith65• 1 month ago

There was a self-help industry long before Tim Ferriss.

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936.

Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI

As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.

Cthulhu_2• 1 month ago

I can't stop referring to the irony that the gist of "the 4-hour work week" is to write a book about working only 4 hours a week.

But also pretty much all of the self-help books I've read can be summarized in a few paragraphs, that is, a blog post. The rest is repetition or examples. Which are important for learning and understanding, I suppose, but when an AI can both tell you the gist of it while applying it directly to your current situation, they can't compete.

wyclif• 1 month ago

Tim Ferriss has been called out on these "ironies" for years now: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-...

NeutralCrane• 1 month ago

The repetition and examples aren’t there for learning. They are there for monetization.

This is my biggest issue with the self-help industry. There is a lot of self-help books out there with ideas that are genuinely valuable, or at least worth considering. But as you say, the entirety of the idea can be conveyed perfectly well in a blog post. But you can’t sell a blog post. So it has to be padded out with cruft into a book length publication that can be sold to people.

That’s how AI undermines the industry. It has those general ideas and can convey them in the simplistic, cruftless versions that are most helpful, and can iterate back and forth with someone on applications to their own life.

PatronBernard• 1 month ago

I'd say it's just moved from books to influencers on social media. Still plenty of money in misleading vulnerable people.

wouldbecouldbe2• 1 month ago

I just don't see it changing, people don't buy knowledge, they pay for trust and authority. It's already been for decades that you could find every workout & workout program for free online or youtube. Yet people decided to buy anyway, because they trust that that person is right, and perhaps they tried the free stuff before and it didnt work (not because it wasn't correct, but because they didn't stick to it)

HPsquared• 1 month ago

This description fits a LOT of economic activity in general.

XCSme• 1 month ago

Kind of, the 4-hour work workweek was one of the first book's I've read (I started late, was never interested), and it had many good insights that lead to me living a freer and more fulfilling life, that I might have not done otherwise.

Sure, you don't need to read an entire book to get the idea to do something, but that's way in which ideas get into your head and consciously or not, guide your steps in certain directions.

Of course, everything in self-help books should be taken with a grain of salt and also applied differently for each individual. It's just a way to get more ideas of what's possible, similar to travelling: it doesn't force you to do things in a certain way, it just shows you what's out there.

piltdownman2• 1 month ago

There's an influencer self-help industry, and then there's the likes of Alain De Botton whose output like 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' firmly sits in the self-help arena. Important to distinguish the two imo.

doctaj• 1 month ago

Yeah I trust nothing. I listened to a hubermanlab podcast and found myself using AI to take a first pass at verifying claims he was making, but everything he suggested was complete bull crap.

tiahura3• 1 month ago

* Tim Ferriss kind of created it.*

There’s literally 100 years of self-help books before, who?

kevin_thibedeau• 1 month ago

This isn't a new phenomenon. Tony Robbins was doing this 40+ years ago.

heisenbit• 1 month ago

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)

duckfruit• 1 month ago

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.

throwaway20377• 1 month ago

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.

chris_money2023• 1 month ago

Something not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive

iLoveOncall• 1 month ago

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

solid_fuel• 1 month ago

The implication is that the self-help books were scraped from Anna's Archive to train the LLMs, thus the content in the books has been integrated into the LLM and may be regurgitated on command. With the content then being available straight from an LLM, there's no need to buy the books.

chris_money2023• 1 month ago

If this was true, they wouldn't be getting sued and aggressively pursued for takedowns

tmaly• 1 month ago

I still buy paper books and audit books even with Anna's Archive.

mwkaufma2• 1 month ago

Grifter publishing-slop sector devastated by slop automation.

tonymet2• 1 month ago

Finally AI-skeptics found something positive

mwkaufma2• 1 month ago

Tim Ferris bemoaning AI in self-help books is like John Henry vs. the drilling machine, except for bullshitting instead of driving rail road spikes.

yieldcrv• 1 month ago

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

innocentoldguy• 1 month ago

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.

beej712• 1 month ago

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.

brlewis2• 1 month ago

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

levocardia• 1 month ago

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

keybored6• 1 month ago

[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.

---

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.

raziel2701• 1 month ago

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?

jaharios• 1 month ago

I like your corner of the internet

nfcampos3• 1 month ago

For what it’s worth, I personally discovered something similar with another category of nonfiction books - economics and business. I read a lot of these circa 10-15 years ago and the rate of new signal id get from each new one eventually became low enough that I stopped reading in that category altogether.

havblue2• 1 month ago

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.

latexr5• 1 month ago

I’m not going to defend the self-help industry, but your dismissal made me think of how Craig Ferguson described bad rehabs VS good rehabs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZVWIELHQQY

Yes, of course you need to put in work to enact change. The bigger the change, the more work you need to put in.

That desire for a quick and easy solution to hard problems is exactly what lead to the proliferation of scams.

havblue2• 1 month ago

Craig Ferguson is magnetic isn't he? Great monologue.

I think with ai, when you get feedback, you are putting in a form of work though. You're practicing recall of previous concepts and having them reinforced while you can get on a narrower and narrower path of what worked and what didn't.

Granted, I have no clue whether this is better than other forms of doing the work like going to a support group or filling out worksheets and journaling, but I do think it is beneficial.

zem• 1 month ago

self help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.

throwaw122• 1 month ago

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

stuaxo• 1 month ago

How can you read LLM generated text, it makes me feel nausious ?

The same phrases and patterns repeated over and over again, blech.

throwaw122• 1 month ago

How can you read LLM generated text

I am not reading most things post-ChatGPT era (books, articles, and even Jira tickets), by habit I am looking at the dates (hopefully they are correct) and then adjusting my effort level accordingly, anything post-ChatGPT depending on the blog author I send to summarization, if I really trust and know the author then I read their article.

sublinear2• 1 month ago

I'm more curious how Publisher's Weekly defines "sales" in this era of subscription plans (e.g. Kindle Unlimited).

Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits?

It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.

neves• 1 month ago

Probably podcasts killed them.

MollyRealized• 1 month ago

He speaks to three examples: YT videos, podcasts, and newsletters/etc. With YT videos and podcasts, I either yank the transcript and pipe it through whisper.cpp, or with YT videos, I'll use the built-in "Ask [Gemini]" and ask it to summarize.

themafia• 1 month ago

Probably not. And you certainly cannot use a retrospective analysis to answer this question.

What you needed was a survey.

throwawaypub• 1 month ago

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.

Panzer042• 1 month ago

People use LLMs for news?

kranke155• 1 month ago

I suspect AI summaries are just reducing peoples need to click through on anything, possibly.

adamtaylor_132• 1 month ago

I don't do news at all. If it's important, someone in my life who spends time on social media will tell me.

alok-g• 1 month ago

As such I don't. Nevertheless, it explains me what's going on better than the news articles.

Also, I think we have oversold the concept of story-telling. Many news articles start with story telling and take a while before coming to the point.

latexr5• 1 month ago

There are entire websites built around that, several have been posted to HN. There was even one (I think real news channel) who experimented with generating fake video of fake anchors to deliver “news”.

NiloCK• 1 month ago

Long ago a friend of a friend described a job interview at an ice cream / chocolate shop in a local mall.

The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc.

Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.

---

Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.

neogodless• 1 month ago

Remember a few years back when many of us were shocked to learn that...

people use Facebook for news?

digitaltrees37• 1 month ago

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.

jagged-chisel• 1 month ago

What do the AI vendors think is going to happen ... ?

That's not this quarter's problem. Not even the current owners' problem. That's a problem for whomever is left holding the bag when they exit before the crash.

karakoram• 1 month ago

How is the email newsletter business/department doing? Are people opening/engaging with your emails or that's declining too?

daytonix• 1 month ago

"Self-help" readers are probably moving from self-help books to llms because they give them the shallow "fix my life" and "get rich quick" answers they want at a faster rate. Now the redpillers have to think even less about why they are such losers.

Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.

itissid• 1 month ago

Still too narrow a take on what self help techniques are killable by ai. I also think self help as a bunch of life hacks and habits is precisely what’s wrong with the industry writ large. They are based on what sells in a capitalist system targeting the attention economy. Creating scarcity on supply side of attention(work longer) and demand side(addictive apps). Take Atomic Habits, one of the things it says is out of many is making the habit you want to form easy to do, e.g place sneakers and shorts next to your bed to make a habit to run in the morning. It presumes a lot about how exactly habits are actually internalized, retained and how one falls into or out of them. I’ve fallen in and out of such habits even after I did them for a while(months). Techniques are very ripe to disruption because people don’t quite understand or have time to understand or observe their own mental state, so hacks sell because you can do them(presumably) as a monkey would.

It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences.

If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too many tears.

r0s• 1 month ago

Almost zero readers buy a book based on the title or content alone. They buy Dr.Phil because they saw him on TV and know a bit about who he is. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people buying books because they respect and admire the author's other work.

AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long.

Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?

noveltyaccount• 1 month ago

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.

Gigachad2• 1 month ago

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.

TheCapeGreek• 1 month ago

For better or worse, AI is beating on video essays too.

Maybe my attention span is truly stuffed, but I really can't stand it when a video essay is the most succinct source on a topic - waiting for someone to express their thoughts in speech, with sometimes slow cadences or their own waffling, combined with sponsor segments (yes I use SponsorBlock, but sometimes or on other devices ads get through), etc.

So I use AI summary for a lot of informational videos now unless I actually am watching it for the entertainment and production value. I don't need 10 minutes on "this will change the way we look at XYZ" that has only 1 minute of real information in it.

throwaway20377• 1 month ago

Can you imagine the day when an AI/LLM-assisted tool can watch a YouTube video at super speed and then clip X% of the video to show you the best parts? I can see it coming. It might really hurt YouTube revenues.

Recently, I had a similar idea when I tried to watch the TV series "SAS: Rogue Heroes". I quit after a few episodes because it was so damn slow. I spent most of each episode skipping pointless dialog and overly long landscape/driving scenes that added little to the story. I am sure the two seasons (10-20 hours) could easily be condensed into a much more exciting 2-4 hour film. I have heard the saying that the hardest type of novel to write is the shortest one. Constraint forces an author to carefully select the words, characters, and storyline that make the most compelling novel. When I was younger, films were rarely more than 90 minutes. These days, so many of them are more than 120 minutes with very little gained... just the same story was watered down over 30+ more minutes.

timwis• 1 month ago

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?

pianopatrick• 1 month ago

Personally for me I realized I could learn everything from YouTube for free so I stopped buying most books, just to save money.

nephihaha5• 1 month ago

Everything is an exaggeration. A lot of things aren't on there and the searches/suggestions are warped, and exclude some of the better videos.

I can think of many subjects which are not well served. Scottish history certainly isn't. The only suggestions it tends to give are Scotland History Tours (who is quite good but surface level) and commentators like BBC (who are often way off the mark and have their own agendas)

mrandish• 1 month ago

I think the core problem of most self-help books is that at best, they're usually an article's worth of knowledge and insight stretched to book length for economic reasons.

To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.

aussieguy1234• 1 month ago

Hardly. I've read several good ones during the AI era and I'm still reading them.

However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book.

I'm also in an actual informal bookclub with a few friends. It started in the AI era, all nonfiction books and is still going strong.

Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.

darepublic• 1 month ago

There's a lot of self help YouTube videos.

lancewiggs• 1 month ago

The rise in sales of GLP-1 products also coincides with the decline in self-help books. Those products are highly effective at delivering some of the hardest self-help outcomes, so why buy a book when you can inject?

akoboldfrying• 1 month ago

Great point actually.

Aboutplants• 1 month ago

AI is probably only a small portion of it. I’m betting most self-help content is consumed via short form video these days and typically done by paid influencers. It’s just shifted from his outdated model

GreenSalem• 1 month ago

Good to see a whole genre of scam artists and their books being displaced.

uwagar• 1 month ago

author says:

Before we dive into my dirty laundry,

dude, why would i want to dive into your dirty laundry man?

dcdgo• 1 month ago

I recently picked up a book at the airport called "Full Stack Human". Wish I hadn't because every second line has "It's not just about X - It's also about Y!" formatting that screamed LLM generated slop. I'd say it most certainly is dead!

tverbeure• 1 month ago

Ferris isn’t doing himself any favor by writing “Let that sink in” in this blog post.

rhipitr• 1 month ago

I think AI will accelerate this, but I think YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts have splintered the market so much there’s not as much space for mega self-help stars anymore, just a lot of middle class ones.

rapidfl2• 1 month ago

+1 that motivation reel on IG hit so hard...

AI is likely correlation not causation. The generation that resonated with the self-help books has aged out. Short form vids on YT, TT, IG taking mind-share is likely the bigger cause.

maxclark• 1 month ago

The average non fiction book is 200 pages, can be summarized in under 10, and is repackaging someone else’s ideas

Literary slop being replaced with AI

bitwize• 1 month ago

Nothing of value would be lost if it did. I feel the same way about the OnlyFans economy.

jdw64• 1 month ago

I wonder if the '1,000 True Fans' concept, which is basically a traditional model, will still work these days. That aside, isn't the hacking style self help genre itself a kind of outdated relic? Honestly, I've read some of this author's books, and they have a distinctly optimistic 2000s to 2010s vibe. Over time, the delivery of knowledge and methodologies changes. Maybe the issue is that the content no longer fits the times.

Looking at the author's books, they're full of healthy living and optimistic narratives. In my view, maybe the problem isn't the old approach itself, but that we need to answer new questions. Like, 'How do I survive in an era where AI takes away jobs?'

And I think the most critical point in this post is this passage:

'What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.'

We use AI for things we don't consider important. If that's the case, I think the key is to convince the public that what I do is something AI cannot replace.

nfcampos3• 1 month ago

I think the same will be true of the ‘popular science’ category of nonfiction

uberex• 1 month ago

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.

m0llusk• 1 month ago

Perhaps, but them how do you explain the claimed pattern that sales had been unusually consistent until just recently?

haritha-j2• 1 month ago

Hard to tell without numbers to back it up. The author's baseline is the year chatGPT was released, i have no idea at what rate they've been declining before that.

enragedcacti• 1 month ago

Well, the If Books Could Kill episode about The 4 Hour Workweek came out September 2023... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-4-hour-workweek/id...

throwaway20377• 1 month ago

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!

ruszki• 1 month ago

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).

edelbitter• 1 month ago

The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.

It does disappear. There is already much less expert knowledge shared after the breakdown of those platforms that used to be so good at encouraging it. Both what the clankers can regurgitate and what humans can find themselves on the internet is increasingly stale and thinned. My GPU can generate fairly good content now.. 2023 content.

DocTomoe• 1 month ago

None of Ferris' books is younger than 10 years. Used copies are plentiful, hardly a library who has not been touched.

At some time, the market has been satisfied.

digitaltrees37• 1 month ago

That might be true but why the steep drop rather than a slow decline?

jdthedisciple• 1 month ago

When Tim Ferriss (net worth of ~ $100m?) of all people gets back to a humble "find your 1000 true fans" what chance do I have? :')

anovikov• 1 month ago

"AI has become good enough at writing bullshit at scale that many bullshit industries are struggling"

geraneum2• 1 month ago

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!

felooboolooomba• 1 month ago

Yes, I'd be interested in seeing this compared to book sales in general.

Ekaros• 1 month ago

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...

geraneum2• 1 month ago

I doubt people who need desperate help buy these books. Desperate help meaning if you can’t pay rent, medical bills, maintain a family, etc.

alanb99• 1 month ago

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.

latexr5• 1 month ago

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.

prepend3• 1 month ago

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.

fundad2• 1 month ago

I agree. And the funny thing is the most enjoyable part of LLMs is it's nice to chat with someone smart.

shevy-java• 1 month ago

So, probably AI had a significant impact here, but I noticed this myself, a non-AI using person, where I bought fewer books than before. There are many reasons for this, financial ones but also practical ones (don't have to story physical books). As well as lack of time; I need to manage my time better, so I have to skip on reading too many new books until I have finished reading the existing stack. Plus the www also has a lot of information. AI may have been killing more humans here (it is skynet after all), but the underlying problems started being serious way before AI already, in my opinion. Also google search being ruined by Google; it is so useless nowadays.

cryptonym• 1 month ago

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.

brador• 1 month ago

People have already actioned most best practise health advice. Weight loss done, sleep fixed, healthy eating done, exercise done.

Only mental health and longevity remain outstanding.

haritha-j2• 1 month ago

Humans already know what's good for them. Self-help books rarely contain new information. All they contain is motivation, depending on how well it's written. People could substitute it with chatGPT, but its unlikely to provide the same motivation. That's why you could ask chatGPT for the 10 most important lessons in the 4 day workweek, but that won't get you anywhere.

digitaltrees37• 1 month ago

I disagree. There are a lot of counter intuitive things we’ve learned from psychology, and early childhood development. And I have learned some of them from books or in person training courses that made a difference.

Humans have know blocks for their own well being. Most struggle with probabilities or long term planning. But they are teachable skills.

jhartikainen• 1 month ago

I've read a bunch of what could be considered "self help" and while they often have a lot of fluff, they do have interesting points. Many of them reference actual research studies to back those points.

I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.

latexr5• 1 month ago

My recommendation is to find a talk by the author online. It’s free and serves the same purpose.

failrate• 1 month ago

It certainly has killed some people looking to it for self help.

l23k4• 1 month ago

I love books, but I could never understand self-help nonfiction books. What's the point? Just about any idea which these books may communicate can be better communicated through fiction.

There's no life lessons you'll learn reading self help-books that you won't get by just reading the classics.

keiferski• 1 month ago

Yes, but only for people that don’t already have an audience.

If Famous Athlete/Entrepreneur writes a self-help type book, people will buy it, because the fame lends legitimacy. Even if the book itself is obviously written by AI.

With an additional caveat: the person needs to have some real, demonstrable authority. Tim Ferris doesn’t really have authority in the sense of “I am a professional athlete” or “I am billionaire startup founder” does. He does have authority as a podcaster and digital products / books creator, but that isn’t what the 4HWW is about.

asdaqopqkq• 1 month ago

LLMs can chew through all the latest in medical research papers, psychological research papers etc. and output better more targeted info for users.

latexr5• 1 month ago

No, they can’t, because LLMs cannot detect utter nonsensical bullshit.

https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scien...

k__• 1 month ago

As I understood it, they were only a US thing anyway. Because of healthcare issues etc.

schnitzelstoat• 1 month ago

Most of these non-fiction, non-technical self-help books are just trash.

I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.

AlexKalWork• 1 month ago

Good riddance, that genre was the slop in literature before AI slop even existed.

dakolli• 1 month ago

Wow, AI finally did something useful, making Tim Ferris and other grifters obsolete. I actually listened to his most recent podcast and it's wild. These people live in a completely different reality.

Remember, Tim Ferris scammed his audience with NFTs lmfao.

jeffrwells2• 1 month ago

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?

wouldbecouldbe2• 1 month ago

Don't know if you did it on purpose or not, but this is hilarious.

Boom890• 1 month ago

Thought so too lol

gb2d_hn• 1 month ago

Self help books are the most filler heavy books. They often have a useful point, but they just don't need to be a book much of the time. This is unfortunate for the authors who have often put significant time into producing the information. Technical manuals typically need all of their content due to the level of detail, and novels need all of their content because it's the content which provides enjoyment. For self help, people just want to know what they need to do to make their lives better? Maybe the work has to move into academia where we have existing infrastructure for rewarding non profitable work for the good of the public?

DanielHB• 1 month ago

It is the same thing with documentaries.

Youtube killed them because it is just a faster delivery of knowledge and information. For super-specific questions chatbots are even faster.

moffkalast• 1 month ago

Idk, the average youtube video repeats the same question five times, dragging shit out with filler as much as possible to reach the required 10 minutes to qualify for two ad runs. It's become a horrible race to the bottom in terms of quality in recent years, though unlike TV documentaries at least it's possible to skip to the conveniently marked highlight these days.

There was this recent Tom Scott interview where he recommends people start their video with quesiton A, ask B before A is resolved, then when that happens, already ask C, etc. and solve C and D at the very end to keep the viewer engaged. Most people seem to just ask A over and over and over with filler in between until the viewer's head explodes.

XenophileJKO• 1 month ago

In my opinion documentaries are too short anyway. I greatly prefer "The Great Courses" vs a 1-2 hour documentary.

There I can listen to a 6 hours about the Olmec civilization.

piltdownman2• 1 month ago

I think you're confusing video-essays with documentaries tbf.

The notion that 'My Octopus Teacher' or 'Boys State' - to name just two award winners of the last decade - could be replaced with some Youtube AI-narrated slop is just disingenuous in the extreme.

krzat• 1 month ago

Not to mention that you can also ask LLM to summarize any of his books, and get the gist.

Reading an entire book may be more beneficient for habit forming, but most readers probably don't care about this.

sinuhe692• 1 month ago

I’ve spent time to read the AI summary (which I normally never do) and the original (of course), and I can tell you the AI summary missed the most important point of the writing. I’d say what they are because it would defy the very purpose of what I’m trying to do.

But I can tell you that it’s enough to refute the AI fallacy many believe.

Gareth321• 1 month ago

Surely this could be corrected by using the correct prompt? If you ask an AI to summarise a book, it's going to cut out 99% of the content. If you wanted to read some of that 99% of the content, you need to be clear about what you want. Otherwise you're leaving the AI to decide. That summary might be good enough for others, but not you. Tell it the focus you would like it to use. E.g. "include anything about the philosophy behind the decision." Whatever your point of interest.

To be clear, a summary will never replace reading 300 pages. But it might be 95% good enough for most people and in most cases, and that's often good enough.

sjamaan• 1 month ago

It's a shame grandparent's link gives a 404 now, I'd love to compare the two.

globular-toast• 1 month ago

Liquid meals in a bottle, short form videos, mainlining compressed information... all "more efficient", but lacking the colour and texture that makes things interesting and enjoyable. Maybe that's all worth sacrificing, but what are people actually doing with all the time this saves? From what I can tell it just seems to be more of the same.

People tend to spend about a third of their lives working for someone else, a third sleeping and the remaining third split between relaxing and working for themselves. This seems invariant. As people earn more money they just buy more stuff, they have no idea what to do with the extra time from not working as much so just keeping walking the hedonic treadmill.

If you can ingest compressed forms of ten self help books in the time it would have taken you to read one, does that mean you can now evaluate them all together, or include the best bits of all of them? Or are you really just addicted to trying to "get on top" and wasting your precious life away sitting at a computer talking to a fake person?

jtbayly• 1 month ago

404 on your link

prepend3• 1 month ago

I think it may be a meta statement on people who summarize with AI on others behalf. The value doesn’t exist and we’re left wondering if the tool user is making a statement, or messed up, or can’t do anything unless claude does it for them.

ChaitanyaSai• 1 month ago

One man's filler is another's phatic communication (if done well and not to pad)

ralferoo• 1 month ago

Oh maybe his books are just seen as less relevant now. When times are good, people buy books like "4 hour work week" because they dream of a day when they might not have to work as much. When times are bad, and they face the very real risk of losing their job (if they haven't already), they have more pressing concerns like whether they can afford to buy groceries that week.

make3• 1 month ago

This felt like a vacuous post by a LinkedIn influencer.

drumhead• 1 month ago

There's a misconception about self help books that they teach you "tricks" that you can instantly use to become a completely different person. A lot of the good ones teach you principles that you need to practice constantly to improve. There's hard work and risk taking involved which many people that buy the books are not prepared to do.

The first self help book that actually helped me was How to make friends and influence people. It was hard for me to overcome my shyness and look people in the eye and smile, but with constant practice I got better at it. Taking an interest in people or being agreeable these are all basic principles that genuinely good communicators use, the book just points you in the right direction you have to apply the hard work and courage.

Good self-help books are rare but they do exist.

ghtbircshotbe• 1 month ago

Self help books definitely have a bad reputation, often with good reason - lots of cliches, preachy, etc.

My favorite advice (and central message I think) from "how to win friends" is to really have the other person's interests at heart, not to try to scam or game them.

Some of my other favorite self help-ish books - a guide to the good life - thank you for arguing - algorithms to live by

wisty• 1 month ago

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.

gorfian_robot• 1 month ago

idk. it helped me fix my washing machine.

goobatrooba• 1 month ago

But that's a concretey very well scoped problem with a clear truth state. Anything mental has none of these properties. Ask an AI if you have depression or another disorder, and keep asking with more details and back and forth, and a few hours later you might be convinced.

thoughtpeddler• 1 month ago

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.

Scroll_Swe• 1 month ago

Good, they where always slop

hmontazeri• 1 month ago

For me sure I’ll get a summary of a book or some video but that’s more like let me find out if the whole thing is worth my time instead of replacing the medium. Everyone who has read a non fiction book once’s knows it’s not about what the summary alone can teach you.. it’s the story and the learning through pain and reflection

999900000999• 1 month ago

Most self help books are useless if not harmful.

Now most are just a 300 page self pitch for some subscription or another product.

Most self help books are too general to be useful to anyone. You're writing your own guidebook for an audience of one.

Hugsbox• 1 month ago

Yep, if AI is killing the self-help book market, all I can say is good riddance.

Sam6late• 1 month ago

I think the acquisition of skills need human guidance,AI has created a quality problem making human self-help books more valuable.

From a new language to public speaking to media training.Some books need more than structure by AI, that is professional knowledge and real-life experience. AI has a vast information ocean, yet a travel book helped me prepare my underwater kit because WiFi does not work underwater, saving me a lot of money I could have wasted on wireless kit.

Take AI apps for teaching languages,Langua is a good example, I think the most successful ones combine human instructors for insights and guidance with AI for drills prescribed and calibrated by the tutor. AI drills are not the same.

lilerjee• 1 month ago

If you work for only 4 hours a week, what practical things could you complete and do you really like the things what you are doing?

If you really like to do the things, you will spend many hours on it.

impostervt• 1 month ago

The other way AI is killing self-help nonfiction: people are generating entire self-help books using AI. The human written are always better, but it's impossible to tell from a book cover and short description.

ChrisRR2• 1 month ago

The human written are always better

I suspect that's not always true. There's so many self help books out there from totally unqualified people that I suspect an AI commingling data from multiple reputable sources may beat some of the most inappropriate books

llm_nerd• 1 month ago

While it's easy to be cynical and see this as everything getting worse somehow, monetizing a simple idea or premise is tough -- I mean, loads of people just put that stuff out there in comments on social media, blog posts, etc, and move on -- so people fluff it up with endless volumes of filler to justify charging a price for it.

Self-help as a domain is absolutely stuffed with this sort of behaviour, where 300 pages just repeat and spin variations on an extremely simple premise, again and again. The reader tags along, sure there's going to be a twist or next level, but in reality it's just trying to justify this being sold as a "book", when at most it could be a single blog entry.

And yes, every single one of Tim Ferriss' books follows this principal. Entire books can be condensed into one page summaries and absolutely nothing will be lost. Nothing. In many cases one paragraph. Sometimes a single sentence.

This problem afflicts all media. There's a "Glucose Goddess" woman who has made an endless series of videos after she had a book do numbers about reducing glucose spikes. She's spinning four bullet points into endless content and it's just a perfect example. Nothing new or revelatory is being shared, but someone made a whole grifting career on this, all to pitch overpriced vitamins and protein powders.

It's actually interesting that someone mentioned YouTube replacing documentaries because people don't have time for that, so to speak, but YouTube is an absolute scourge of time wasting bullshit. I remember years ago one Apple-sphere guy posting a 10 minute video to answer the question "Should you get 8GB or 16GB in your Macbook". Ten minutes of yapping -- apparently ten minutes was the baseline for getting some monetization metric -- and the answer was an unqualified, worthless "get 16GB", because feels or something.

YouTube recently added an "Ask" AI button, and it includes generating extremely good summaries of videos. So many videos propose some clickbait headline with a clickbait graphic proposing some novel revelation, and in the first few seconds I've seen the summary, see that they have added absolutely nothing new or of value, and click back.

Will these people also post complaints about the drop in viewership about worthless, time inconsiderate content dragging not hitting like it once did? Probably. "Back in my day you could make a career by posting shocked-face thumbnail, a Betteridge's law of headlines question that you promise to answer, and then meander for twenty minutes. Kids these days just don't have the attention span anymore!"

frgturpwd• 1 month ago

I agree with everything you are saying, especially as someone whose main goal behind going into content is to understand, and have agreed with it for so long, and in my attempt to understand - ever since I was young - what people get from self-help books, I realized something. I do believe this - our - perspective neglects the difference between reading to "get a complex premise", and reading/watching something simple as some sort of lengthy ritual to get you to marinate on the idea and to allow yourself enough time to "change". Those 300 pages have the benefit of making you "stay with the idea" for however long reading 300 pages takes you, and that's what people who are into self-help like. Being persuaded.

That said, a lot of it is really filler.

jimnotgym• 1 month ago

Hopefully it will kill off the self-help grifters on social media too, all without telling me that if I drink Huel or Athletic Greens I would be a millionaire too

prmoustache• 1 month ago

Or maybe it is just a coincidence that people have grown tired of this kind of bullshits. This genre has been trendy for a while already, there had to be a moment people would just collectively realize their life is not measurably better after reading so many of them.

ura_yukimitsu• 1 month ago

I'd like to point out the irony of that blog post checking all the boxes of LLM-generated text, and I'm surprised I don't really see anyone talking about it here. Did Tim Ferriss (who's supposed to be an author) use a LLM to write this? If he actually writes like that, perhaps the reason why his sales have gone downhill is that people have noticed they don't need to pay to get the same result.

paride5745• 1 month ago

Good.

The vast majority of self-help books out there are ghost-written upsales trash.

mmarian• 1 month ago

As an aside, I've been using Claude to search for blog posts from people who went through similar experience to mine. Then use Eleven Readers app which converts the voice to text to listen to it. It's been much better for self therapy vs talking to an LLM.

amelius• 1 month ago

I guess soon AI will kill __all__ books. If you can just type "please summarize that book into 1 page", or "make a 30 seconds tiktok format clip summarizing this book".

ramaseshanms• 1 month ago

People will still own the ideas. The way they are shared is changing yet again. Just like a kindle carried a Book to a user, and LLM with RAG will do as well.

Printing books wouldnt make sense anymore except for "Traditionalist who love feeling a crisp page between their fingers"

red__dragon• 1 month ago

Still books would disappear, mate.

Borrible• 1 month ago

You can only hope.

sometimez• 1 month ago

I defininitely read fewer nonfiction books but not because of AI but because I like reading Littler Books.

ulfw• 1 month ago

Is there anything AI will not kill eventually?

rsynnott2• 1 month ago

So, not willing to put much time into researching this, but from a quick Google it looks like sales absolutely _exploded_ in the early 10s. This could be AI... or it could just be reversion to the mean as a fad died.

mglvsky• 1 month ago

I think, considering length of "self-help content", there is spectrum, and in the both ends of such spectrum there is conflict of interests - audience vs authors.

In the first end - short-form content: yt shorts, tiktoks, tweets, ig posts - "authors" have interested to just have more engagement, so we end up with ragebait, fringe ideas, etc - everything for just viewers count go up, the substance doesn't matter at all.

In the other end - "long-form" content: books (usually thick ones), writers for some reason need to fill extra content alongside the substance, some off-topic stuff, I'm not professional writer/editor, but I suppose it's protection from some nitpickers, adding some scientific basis to look more solid (don't know why: author can pick any research that support's book idea, even already debunked), maybe there is requierement from publishers, editors, etc.

The sweet spot here are thin books here, but even that case they cannot help much, because even a therapy sometimes cannot help for someone (heck, there is a real person trying help, not just text with ideas!)

randusername• 1 month ago

Self-help is 1 part information and 1 part magnetic point-of-view.

AI is better at personalized information, short-form content offers a snappier and more "real" point-of-view.

What I find most interesting is the appeal to authority aspect. Self-help always has had its gurus. If self-help is getting hit harder than other genres, I wonder what that says about brand trust.

EDIT: could also be that these books are kinda fads. I would expect them to have a shelf-life.

FinnLobsien• 1 month ago

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.

herf• 1 month ago

AIs and podcasts (which also grew a lot recently) are free alternatives, and pricing matters as much as attention.

themythfable• 1 month ago

Betteridge law [1]

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no

Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff.

Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

sharadov3• 1 month ago

I think there are more nuggets of wisdom in great fiction than these self help books.

Maybe if someone put together a list of fiction books that correlate strongly with self-help categories, it would be immensely useful.

A great fiction book helps you vicariously experience a character's life while self-help is an instruction manual which sadly does not provide the same form of connection.

olooney• 1 month ago

Haruki Murakami's entire body of work is basically self-therapy[1] and personally I feel it's been very therapeutic. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an excellent place to start.

[1] https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/2022/02/i-always-s...

bergie• 1 month ago

It has sort of killed books. I'm hesitant to buy anything published after 2022 if I don't know the author. So much slop out there...

Kyuren• 1 month ago

Yea the shift is right in front of our eyes. It's a "if everyone is super, no one will be" situation. People will simply gravitate towards that with less supply, and that's usually smaller but higher quality content(whatever content means for you whether entertainment or software). The line will split in two ways, some will start making higher quality content which stands out beyond the noise and branching in ways that we've never seen before, and the others will chase the higher but more fraudulent numbers of easily generated content.

sota_pop• 1 month ago

Sturgeon’s Law abounds.

I’ve always found that most books within or similar to Ferris’ genre hold a nice message but are 90 fluff.

He picks on summarization as the sort circuit and claims the lived experience imbued within his books is the real draw. Not disagreeing here. LLMs unpack the intentional content stretching rigmarole authors go through as a function of publishers requirements to produce something that is minimally viable to publish.

Some seemingly important questions that come to my mind in a future where LLMs, ad-based revenue, and attention-as-currency prevail:

how do you create a knowledge-based product valuable/compelling enough to make people want to pay for it? And what is the best value-prop way to monetize it? (For BOTH producer and consumer)

Is length a necessary requirement for substantiveness?

If so, where on the spectrum of long-content_vs_short-content should it live?

Unfortunately, I im not confident the internet can fundamentally diverge from an ad-based or subscription monetization model in its current form. IMO, Michael I Jordan has a lot of refreshing ideas on how to build better marketplaces that sustainably benefit producers and consumers (as opposed to mostly just platform-maintaining-rent-seekers).

abhishekjiitr• 1 month ago

If self-help was just about reading the insights then millions of people would have "won friends and influenced people", and those book summary apps would be billion dollar companies. They'are not

Self-help books are absolutely worthless if you don't internalise their insights, practice applying it into your life on a daily basis until it becomes muscle memory, and actually spend time on it. The insight is never actually the bottleneck.

AI can surface insights better and faster than any book. But speed is the problem, not the solution. Books are on the contrary slower, and slowness is the point. Without discpline, AI might be a worse choice.

For deeper topics, I don't think books are going away anytime soon.

Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?

Related Stories