Interesting read, but there's one fairly major shift the author missed: the transition away from long-form printed books into bite-sized, often free/ad-supporte

Interesting read, but there's one fairly major shift the author missed: the transition away from long-form printed books into bite-sized, often free/ad-supported online content. In the charge-by-the-piece print publishing world, the economics don't work for anything smaller than a hundred pages or so, which means you need to get a single author to write a lot (= a book) or compile together a bunch of stuff from different authors (= magazines, anthologies, etc). We take this as granted, but a hundred years ago smaller works were still common: Marx's Communist Manifesto was a 30-page pamphlet. In the online world, this is no longer a concern. Much of my print reading has been replaced by following blogs, many of them on "serious" topics, where even the longest post is rarely longer than a single book chapter. And whereas it was previously quite difficult for an unknown to get accepted into a magazine, much less a book, it's now an everyday occurrence for an aggregator like HN to pick up a piece and get tens of thousands of readers for it. This parallels what we're seeing in music and film: the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered, but the effort/skill/luck needed to make money off it has gone up to compensate.