[Retric]

Hogwash.

Producing books without a profit motive requires some other means to support the vast time investment. Thus robbing the world of great works from those lesser creatures who still need to work for a living.

The only loss is competition drowning out the works of well off but talentless people. We’ll get vanity projects either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.

[dredmorbius]

Profit motive's not doing much for great works of literature:

"The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024)

Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>

I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out).

I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest.

I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view.

There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.

[Retric]

The big five are hardly the only purveyors of for profit works.

Go back through any list of the great works and you’ll find a great deal of populist authors. Shakespeare, Dickens, Herman Melville, etc were producing the exact kinds of works you’re looking down on.

Perhaps something fundamentally changed, but it seems more likely bias is talking here.

[dredmorbius]

William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) predates the first modern copyright law, the Statute of Anne (1710), by roughly a century. His income came from performances, that is, asses in seats, not book sales. His posthumous fame came in large part from the fact that those published plays were free from copyright encumberance and could be performed or published without licence fee.

Dickens pioneered the model of serial publication on which other authors of his time (notably Tolstoy) made much comment.

You've failed to mention Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was constantly in debt, damned near killed himself with one of his two possessions (a revolver, the other being a nickel), broke and unemployed in San Francisco. His relative financial flush later in life was largely due to his father-in-law's support. And asses-in-seats on the lecture circuit.

Melville, like many other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald of Gatsby fame comes to mind) saw a greatly-increased fame after his death, with Moby Dick becoming reestablished on the centennial of Melville's birth, some 28 years after his death. Melville worked during his life as a clerk, sailor, and farmer. His writing career met with very limited financial success. His works were great, no doubt, his income failed to measure up, and could hardly be considered his chief incentive. Later in life, like Twain, Melville benefitted by inheritance and lectures.

[Retric]

The point you seemed to have missed was each of them were populist authors.. To look down on populist writing is to misunderstand western literature.

Further we never got to read a book by Shakespeare because of the lack of copyright at the time. Imagine a world where he had more time to devote to such things.

Similarly Dickens was hampered by being paid by the word.

Melville on the other hand wrote Moby-Dick through the commercial success of less famous works. What happened later in life isn’t particularly relevant here, what’s generally considered the greatest work of western literature was completely dependent on someone being paid for their writing. It wasn’t some breakout novel from a new writer it’s the culmination of serious refinement of his talents that takes not just inspiration and life experience but time.

[dredmorbius]

I don't know where you got the notion I look down on populist authors or its writing. I'm talking about the market of writing itself, and the incentives actually in effect for writers.

Book sales at the time of Shakespeare would have been hampered by a number of factors, including the slow rate of printing presses (about 60--120 impressions/hour), the cost of books (cheap pulp-based paper had yet to be invented), and low literacy rates (25% or less of the population).

It wasn't until all of those were developed, largely during the 19th century, in which printing rates increased roughly a millionfold (wood grape-crush presses to electrically-powered, steel-framed, Linotype-set, continuous-paper-roll web presses), cheap paper, and 90%+ literacy rates), that owning more than a handful of books became common. Development of the paperback further accelerated this, often through the re-issue of out-of-copyright "classics" in low-cost libraries for the everyman.

Even the notion of a bookcase or bookshelf as a notable item of furniture is a surprisingly late development, largely since 1860, and growing markedly in prevalence after 1900, judging by Google's Ngram viewer:

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bookshelf%2C%2...>

(A methodology with issues, but a methodology all the same.)

Sales of modern books are largely all but nonexistent. It might not be only a dozen copies (the famous quote fails to account for multiple ISBNs existing per title), but even a few thousand sales isn't going to support much of a livelihood, and there are ~300k English-language titles published traditionally per year (and have been since the 1950s), expanding to a million or several including "nontraditional" publsihing, going off numbers directly from the US Library of Congress's Copyright office, annual letters, and ISBN issuer Bowker.

<https://writingcooperative.com/half-of-all-traditionally-pub...>

Bowker: <https://web.archive.org/web/20150415233658/https://www.bowke...> (2013)

Office of Copyright: <http://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2015/ar2015.pdf> (2015)

Library of Congress: <https://www.loc.gov/static/portals/about/reports-and-budgets...> (2023)

My point wasn't that populist works cannot be created. It's that there are other rationales to writing, that most of the Great Works were written without copyright, that chasing dollars leads, as Schopenhauer expresses far more elegantly and cogently than I can, to sludge (now AI-generated sludge, such as these services <https://www.childbook.ai/> <https://www.createbookai.com/collection/mothers-day-books>.

I'm not opposed to great literature. I'm not opposed to authors being paid. I'm not even opposed to reasonable copyright terms. But I'm pretty well convinced that the existing system actually serves all those goals poorly.

Sure, the occasional author goes stratospheric.

But for most people, the reasons for writing a book differ:

- They can't not.

- It's a calling card. (See the parallel HN submission on business books. Most are extensive advertisements for consulting services. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43940747> Other books essentially sell businesses or systems.

- The writing fills other aims. Book -> Film (asses in seats, or subscription revenues). Advertising bait (mainstay of the publishing industry from ~1860 to, variously, 1950--2000, see my fave Hamilton Holt writing in 1906: <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.

- Part of some other job. Academics write for tenure, to meet public communications targets, for recognition, or other goals.

- Propaganda. There are organisations which write and sell publications effectively to spread faith and doctrine. Some in the original religious sense, others with political, social, or cultural goals.

- Vanity. Though that may be less successful than other options.

- It's cheap. If the story or idea is in you and can't keep from coming out, why not commit it to the page, or electrons in the cloud? Writing and publishing are cheaper than they've ever been, and if you can break through there's that ever-so-small chance of winning the lottery, sometimes big, often small.

- The materials already exist. A surprising number of books are assembled from lecture notes, speaking points, or essays on numerous topics. (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is based on his course lecture notes, taught for several decades at the University of Edinburgh. Feynmans Lectures in Physics similarly. These may not be trivial to edit into shape, but working from an existing structure is often quite useful.

At the same time, chasing a buck gives AI sludge, formulaic genre fiction, tired professional and technical books, straight-up bullshit (Depak Chopra, John Gray (the Venus hack, not the philosopher), Erich von Däniken, etc., etc. One thing about pseudoscience is that its authors and publishers are often grifters taking advantage of gullible audiences and markets. Their bullshit books are actually a sorting and marketing mechanism to other goods and services (e.g., fortune-telling, pyramid schemes, cults, and the like.) All of that is driven by profit, without any regard to quality.

[Retric]

Weekly newspapers showed up over a decade before Shakespeare died. The feasibility of “mass market” books on a technical level are debatable, but he would have effectively been guaranteed a hit for the time based on his skill and reputation even if it was quite expensive for regular people.

> most of the Great Works were written without copyright

English copyright showed up in 1710, US soon followed. So you must have a very different list of Great Works than normal.

As to the economics today, the average advance on a book is ~60,000$. Now you’re going to have to do reasonably well to keep getting those advances but plenty of people are buying books. The percentage of readers are down but there was less than 1/2 as many Americans and under 1/3 as many people globally in 1950.