The end of the book publishing industry is not quite the same thing as the end of books. Books can exist without an industry. Not without readers.
There was a time when I stood in front of a wall of drawers, each one containing the manuscript of an aspiring author, and my boss said to me, "Pull out five or ten of these and see if any of them are worth publishing". This led to an email being sent to an author who had given us his PhD thesis: he was an American surviving as an English teacher in Beijing, and he was absolutely delighted to hear that we had been reading his manuscript. Laboring in obscurity, without anyone ever having taken the slightest interest in his research, he said he was astonished to learn that we were aware of his existence at all. In an office largely staffed by employees who couldn't read English, his manuscript had been gathering dust in that drawer for many years before I happened to have a look at it.
Either out of idle curiosity or out of eagerness to seal the deal, he made a trip just to meet with us, at the office, face to face. I spent several hours over several days speaking with the man —not just about the book, but about his life in general. He was somewhat crestfallen when I explained just how much work would still need to be done for the manuscript to make the transition from "good enough for an unpublished thesis" to "being a real book".
In the absence of an industry, there is no such editorial process: he could simply upload the manuscript to Amazon (making it available to anyone who searches for key terms in the title) to be ignored or adored by a theoretically infinite number of readers. The actual number would be close to zero. Both with the old model and the new, there is no opportunity for the author to earn any money: the work is undertaken entirely for the remaining, relatively pious, pursuit of fame, power, respect and sex. Not necessarily in that order.
Years ago, I made two youtube videos about a (theretofore obscure) academic article about "innumeracy" and the widespread misunderstanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect: when you looked at the math behind the myth, the whole hypothesis was revealed to be a hoax —in a very real sense, the effect did not exist, it was merely a concept the mass media had popularized without taking any sincere interest in the science. My youtube videos had vastly more viewers than the written articles ever had before that point, but (even worse?) the vast majority of the people who ended up reading the academic articles did so, thereafter, only because they had learned about the controversy from my youtube videos.
If you regard this pattern of "discovery" optimistically, keep in mind: even that small measure of success (in the dry research eventually reaching a wet audience, thanks to my moistening of the information in video form) was only possible because of the feasibility of reaching an interested audience through youtube as a platform —and this feasibility would prove to be fleeting. Both the nature of the platform and the attitudes of the audience were subject to change.
Neither I nor any other niche non-fiction youtuber could do for that innumeracy article today what I did so many years ago. Youtube is now successful as a "recycler" of mainstream media content (such as music videos originally intended for MTV, Hollywood movies, and corporate news that would be broadcast on conventional television anyway) but fails in precisely the role of connecting new content creators to an audience that it served before. And it was a whole decade before: we are implicitly contrasting 2015 to 2025 here —and that would feel like an even longer time if you'd been living like Tana Mongeau.
Likewise, in retrospect, the opportunity to become a political commentator on Twitter was self-evidently fleeting, although everyone who engaged in the competition (while it lasted) thought the opportunity provided by the platform was infinite and never-ending.
It once seemed that anyone could become the next "The Amazing Atheist", both in the sense that an infinite number of people could find an audience (creating the same kind of content) simultaneously, and also that they could compete over an infinitely long period of time. The infinite proved to be very finite indeed: Youtube has not been replaced by a viable competitor in this capacity, and while there may be (in this narrow sense) "another youtube" in future, but it would likely offer an even more fleeting window-of-opportunity (perhaps a few months rather than a few years?). The Amazing Atheist appealed to a very small niche: what I have to say about Plato's First Alcibiades… even smaller.
I have heard Kevin Smith narrate just how much success was possible with extremely little effort in "the golden age" of podcasting: he recalled examples of podcasts with totally generic titles along the lines of "two guys talking about stuff" suddenly reaching a huge audience. That was a window of opportunity that came and went. What chance, today, does an author have in reaching an audience with a manuscript titled, A Book About a Thing Written by a Chap? The assumption that content will have a specific title that people are already searching for has implications both shallow and profound: it is very difficult to succeed by answering a question that people are not already asking —to create content that is not already being searched for.
Youtube no longer unifies an audience as it did before: it has gone through a "sunrise and sunset" cycle in some ways similar to MySpace —in some ways quite different (because Youtube continues to earn revenue by providing access to utterly "non-Youtube" content such as the BBC and CNN). The character of the audience that you can reach through youtube in its sunset phrase has also changed qualitatively: the absence of employed people with something better to do is palpable —and the overwhelming presence of people who are either mentally disabled or physically retired is impossible to ignore. There was a time when I met people with two kids and a full time job through youtube, and there was a time when social media introduced me to the company of hardworking people with ambitions to change the world; it has now become the domain of people who truly do not have anything better to do —in the same sense that you can meet nobody but the most indolent losers through Twitch streaming and Discord.
Just as certainly as the audience needs to know that a video is worth clicking on, the author needs to know that the audience is worth creating the video for: the gap between the ostensible and the actual is a problem for both.
Youtube videos and podcasts "as an industry" rely on a near-infinite number of niche uploads with titles that directly tell the customer what it is they will now learn about (or be mindlessly entertained by) before they make the decision to give it a mouse-click. Someone searches for Elagabalus and they have their pick: my contribution to the "genre" of historical commentary on the Emperor Elagabalus sits alongside a finite number of other contributors who have attempted more-or-less the same task, each with their own agenda. As the years go by, there is less and less incentive for creators to add to that tiny genre, whereas the very first video (or podcast) with Elagabalus in the title is guaranteed to reach an audience of a reasonable size, even if it takes many years to accumulate. Conversely, a genuinely new story or subject is a relatively lucrative opportunity —and so a great deal of clickable content contains a current controversy in the title. Perhaps it would be more meaningful for me to discuss Aristotle than Onision's sex life: in fact, the only way to reach an audience interested in Aristotle was to comment on then-current controversies, such as Onison's sex life.
I once made an especially histrionic video about palm oil and the idiocy of vegans who regard it as ethically tantamount to pork: it reached several thousand viewers immediately —and the histrionics helped a great deal with "the distribution", shall we say. Over a period of about ten years, I became an expert in the mixture of the shocking and the substantive required by the medium, learning what it can and can't accomplish in delivering non-fiction to a certain kind of audience. The strengths and weaknesses of the clickable video format (youtube or otherwise) are almost diametrically opposed to the paper publishing format.
This article I am writing now: it could have been recorded as a podcast and it could have been recorded as a video. If so, how many listeners (or viewers) would it have reached? How many this month, and how many over the next ten years? Both in the short term and the long term, video and audio will reach a larger audience than a block of text.
There are good reasons to, instead, write text, but they aren't good enough for the authors (who, as noted, cannot earn any money from the process or product anyway) and it seems increasingly impossible to ignore the extent to which these reasons are not good enough for the readers. Even at zero cost to the subscriber, the book publishing industry has failed to make a case for why anyone should read anything —rather than getting the same information "performed aloud" for them while they do planking exercises and/or wash dishes. Yes, by using the conjunction "and/or", I am insinuating that it would be possible to simultaneously do planking exercises and also wash the dishes.
The comic book industry has recently admitted how little money is to be made out of even the most brazenly profit-seeking production possible, placing the written word next to enticing images of men and women in skin tight spandex, engaged in acts of superheroic violence: the bankruptcy of Diamond (a distributor, not a publisher) indirectly reveals how few retailers have been making enough money to pay their debts to the distributor.
Our word generic carries negative connotations, but one of the strengths of text (on paper or displayed on screen) is the relationship between the genus and the species. If you buy a monthly magazine titled Politics in Thailand you get an edited selection of generic articles about anything and everything happening in the politics of that country, possibly that month, possibly including new perspectives on historical events in the distant past. The reader's relationship is to a broad genre in deciding to spend time (and perhaps money) in looking at the table of contents, then deciding if this month's issue contains anything worth reading: this is fundamentally different from ten thousand content creators uploading one hundred thousand videos (and podcasts) specifying the controversy they're commenting on in the title of each upload. In the latter scenario, the viewer (or listener) stumbles upon a selection of search results only when typing in a given topic. The absence of an editorial team and a table of contents shapes creator behavior (in what is said) even more powerfully than consumer behavior (in what is heard).
If you had a team of people working together to publish Politics in Thailand as a magazine, various topics would be assigned to each author for each month (even if the assignment were voluntarily arranged by the authors as a committee, without an editor in an executive role) to cover a range of what was deemed discussable. It would not be the case that each and every author (on the team) would produce an article on the same cryptocurrency scandal to compete for one and the same the audience that would search for key terms related to that scandal. Conversely, on youtube, there may be ten thousand perspectives on the cryptocurrency scandal (in English) without a single one researching the uniquely Thai aspect of the problem.
The generic publication ends up fostering much more specific research over a broader range of topics; decentralized competition for a mouse-click on youtube results in reduplication of labor across a range of more-or-less meaningless niche channels. Admittedly, my own perspective on cryptocurrency, as uploaded to youtube, is subject to this same criticism (try as I might to be more substantive and sincere than the vast majority of dreck that competed with me for the interest of the same amorphous audience). I was neither able to survey politics nor to specialize in politics as I would have been if I had been working at a magazine (with an editor and a table of contents) in a bygone era.
A team of people writing a magazine about the politics of veganism: with or without editorial guidance, they would "spread out" the work of research and writing to cover what was considered important —they would not assign all of the writers to produce similar articles about Freelee and Durianrider, for example. In the absence of an editorial process, what we got, instead, was precisely the devotion of all of the (decentralized) talent to commenting on one and the same controversy (whether it was Freelee, cryptocurrency or otherwise, at any given moment in time). If Elon Musk has been caught cheating at video games, the system (or the absence of any system whatsoever) rewards everyone for "piling on", and adding one more redundant opinion about how evil he is, because that is what the audience is searching for; by contrast, an editor compiling a set of articles into a book would want just one chapter dealing with that subject, and then would commission separate chapters criticizing other aspects of Elon Musk's career.
My own career on youtube (now in the past tense) made canny use of these dynamics: I would "jump on" controversies of the moment, expecting fewer than one in a thousand of the viewers attracted to the headline to later click through to see my other content. This rare viewer would then discover that I'd made videos of real substance about Aristotle, or some other topic that might interest them, and I wasn't just providing commentary on the controversy of the moment (related to veganism, related to cryptocurrency, or otherwise). Given how extremely niche all of that content was, and given how unpopular my own political perspective must be, I was extremely successful in using one niche to reach people who'd be interested in another, again and again: I recruited viewers (who remained with me for many years) by the strength of videos criticizing Game of Thrones, the ethics of utilitarianism, and the exigencies of polyamory. I discussed a huge range of unrelated (niche) subjects that had nothing in common but their commentator, gradually gathering an audience interested in what that commentator would say next. Jumping on controversies of the moment was crucial to that constant process of recruiting new viewers. Fewer than one in a thousand viewers interested in what I had to say about Jordan Peterson would be interested in what I had to say about any topic other than Jordan Peterson —but so be it.
In the old industry, the author had to overcome the indifference of the commissioning editor, having no direct contact with the audience, whereas the new industry (or lack thereof) puts the content creator in the position of screaming out against the indifference of members of the audience without an intermediary. My own commentary on the Peter Singer sex scandal: how much different would it have been (in both style and substance, both form and content) if it had been produced to be one article in a magazine (or one segment of a generalized vegan news TV show) rather than "standing alone" to be discovered by searching for a specific search term? Both my satirical and serious responses to that scandal were relatively subdued: if I had been more sensational, would I have reached a larger audience? And given what idiots the audience would consist of, would I really want to try sensationalizing the matter further?
If the intellectual level of the audience is too low to be worth writing for and the author knows it, what then? If the production of new content becomes the domain only of authors so stupid (or so corrupt) that they would willingly pander to an audience that they know to be intellectually despicable, ethically despicable, and emotionally despicable, what then?
It is not the case that the audience needs to be impressed by the author: on the contrary, the author must be impressed by the audience to be motivated to create anything at all for them —and this is more true than ever before, in this era when the whole exercise is pro bono. Our culture questions the extent to which the reader can trust the author; we must now, instead, learn to think in terms of the author's trust in the readers —trusting that the readers exist at all —and trusting that they are people worth writing for.
