I used to get ads for a subscription service that takes the endless stream of self-help crap the industry churns out and turns it into short podcasts or whatever. It’s aimed at business folks who are too busy generating value for the economy to sit down and read, but I also wonder if there’s really more than a half-hour’s worth of content in these books anyway. They mostly seem like they’re organized around a pretty simple concept that gets dressed up as hidden knowledge so there’s a product to sell, and then they need to get padded out to book length so that the product seems worth the purchase price. Sure, some books (mainly textbooks) need to be huge because the information density there is actually high, and you can’t condense a novel the same way because reading fiction is supposed to be an aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experiences are not compressible, but I imagine people get taught that a lot of the nonfiction they read is basically fluff and end up with the instinct to strip it out of everything because we’ve collectively lost the ability to understand or enjoy art.