Walking through Barnes and Noble and I feel like I'm surrounded by a bunch of bad, excessively lengthy Twitter threads. Engagement bait whose metric is sales instead of impressions.

Optimized for lowest-common-denominator consumption because you won't go viral/sell copies otherwise. Like everyone is hiring the same publicists/consultants and running the same playbook because they have no idea what else to do.

The nonfiction is mostly peddling low-resolution solutions to people who badly want to be told what to do, almost all of them should be long essays. The fiction feels mechanical, like chatGPT had a quota to hit.

I make a habit of going into every book store I come across (in different countries too) and they all seem to be increasingly converging on this off-putting strategy. Or maybe I'm just noticing it more.