Comment by torton
3 months ago
Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.
Dropping in popularity, but not relevance.
Reading is still a completely different thing from a book, a stream of consciousness between a writer and a reader, than it is reading in almost any other format. The way we read online from websites and apps is changing how our brains work and how we process text for information (not for the better). We're slowly becoming like the look-up tools that we use in Google and other search engines and LLM agents.
The best way for many chronically online dopamine fried people today to revert their brain back to some normality would be for them to read books and to fight through the distractions as they read.
Dropping in popularity equals dropping in relevance.
When more people get their information calories from sources that are not books, what the books say becomes less relevant.