Mark thinks 911, Iraq, Bush created an insatiable appetite for nonfiction, but things will dry up with the coming of a saner presidency:
The past decade has been a golden age for non-fiction. The books on 9-11 eventually came. A raft of books on history and politics followed. The Bush presidency has been a book selling engine ever since. With Bush gone, publishing is due for the same chill as The Daily Show — the fountain of rich source material will be turned off. Not to oversimplify — health, nutrition, and cooking books have also sold tremendously well during the decade. The publicity-flashing effect seen with books like The Atkins Diet was caused by a concentration of media power that is now fragmenting — more correctly consumers’ interest in concentrated media is fragmenting. That is all to say the non-fiction book market is crashing. The retailers think so anyway. It is as if they forgot (or never knew) what bookselling was like before the South Beach Diet and Stupid White Men. [more...]
He also thinks we’ll move back to importance of fiction. We’ll see, but we also have the greatest economic collapse since 1929 to deal with, so maybe we’ll all be reading economic textbooks over the next few years.
