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> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contempo

• Animats 1y ago
  > I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers. That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
  • xhkkffbf 1y ago
    And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably available for free from the library's DVD collection?
    • sdenton4 1y ago
      Relevance! eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
      • Animats 1y ago
        > What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? That's a tough question? Going to college and taking on debt no longer looks like a good choice. What to learn that won't be heavily devalued in four years?
    • HK-NC 1y ago
      I feel a reader or a music lover is more likely to delve into the past than a gamer or movie watcher. I cant remember meeting anyone that was put off by the age of a book or a song, but have recommended games and movies to hardcore gamers and self labelled cinephiles and they were written off immediately due to age.
  • whstl 1y ago
    True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music. For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing". Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
    • layer8 1y ago
      On the other hand, music is arguably more timeless, in that the contents of lyrics is less crucial for the enjoyment of music.
      • galaxyavenu 1y ago
        I don't think that's true at all, plenty of my friends has some kind of aversion to "old" music because they could not "get" the aesthetic. Plus I'm sure most people are sick of Fur Elise.
      • whstl 1y ago
        Compositions: absolutely. More “evergreen” genres like classical, jazz, soundtracks, and also stuff by established artists? Surely! But pop music recordings get “too dated” quite fast for the mainstream and mainstream audiences. This kinda keeps Spotify and Radio charts fresh and newer artists make some money. IMO of course! EDIT: Wait! One thing however where you’re right and I’m wrong is with live concerts. Today older legacy acts compete and often surpass attendance of newer acts.
    • makeitdouble 1y ago
      To note, books have a different networks: they can get movie/TV/game adaptions and get pushed to the news forefront, their author can also play the SNS game. There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how tougher than other media it is.
      • 1y ago
  • boznz 1y ago
    and the author of course is only sampling a very tiny dataset of the works pushed by the algorithm. Many authors like me will never get on their radar.
  • BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    > That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good. John Philip Sousa was right about recorded music.
• golol 1y ago
  I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of creating more of what exists already.
  • jay_kyburz 1y ago
    Video Games were immune for a while because technology was changing so fast, but in the last decade or so its become really clear players don't care nearly as much about graphics as they used to. People will quite happily pickup and play games from many years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made before they were born.
    • taormina 1y ago
      Well, graphics plateaued and then we started to remember that fun and highest fidelity graphics don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      People do care enough about graphics for Bethesda to spend time and money making e.g. Oblivion Remastered, though.
      • jay_kyburz 1y ago
        Oblivion is nearly 20 years old now and looked terrible at the time. (compared to other games that shipped at the time) Oblivion is a _big_ game not a polished game. update: I found this screenshot and I think I was remembering Morrowinds characters. https://slayweb.blogspot.com/2011/08/elder-scrolls-evolution.html https://slayweb.blogspot.com/2011/08/elder-scrolls-evolution...
        • int_19h 1y ago
          Morrowind had very janky animations, but it wasn't too bad for 2002 otherwise. Definitely not top notch, but, well, look at faces in Deus Ex for another example from this period... Oblivion had those weird faces but was otherwise pretty good actually, especially the lush outdoor environments.
• eviks 1y ago
  > A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing. Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
  • citizenpaul 1y ago
    >bigger social part Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest. Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard. I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
    • nottorp 1y ago
      > It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest. That may say something about the declining quality of writing. You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
      • voidhorse 1y ago
        I think it's due to a general decline into literalness. I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
• pseudocomposer 1y ago
  This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account. That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing. (I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
  • citizenpaul 1y ago
    The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
    • voidhorse 1y ago
      This equates the value of art with technical difficulty, which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
      • bigstrat2003 1y ago
        I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
        • Avicebron 1y ago
• bloomca 1y ago
  There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now. Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more. Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.
• watwut 1y ago
  I kind of think a lot of these are bought as gifts, not really a thing people actually intend to read.
  • Eisenstein 1y ago
    Or for college classes.
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a Mario game really top Super Mario World? Not to say some later games aren't fun, but Persona 6 could only really top Persona 5 by being something really different, and if it was different it wouldn't be Persona 6.
  • default-kramer 1y ago
    Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any 16-bit or earlier game.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      That might be true about the time period from the SNES to the present but it's not clear to me that we're really getting better games post the PS3. I have Persona 5 Royal on my mind because I am playing through it now maybe a decade after I played Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art, but the music isn't up there with P4G (how can you beat Reach out or Make history?) and I think it's a disappointment as a game. Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with the characters and raise your social stats but practically you're not required to make hard choices because you have enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough which stretches out the game even longer. It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago. My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap. Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can make a storefront in Horizon Worlds but you need to have a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one person.
• DharmaPolice 1y ago
  I agree. I've often thought about this via a thought experiment : How much money would it take for you to agree not to consume any new instance of a particular media type? In other words, you're offered fifty thousand dollars (or some other non-trivial but not outrageous amount of money) and in agreement you won't read a book released after June 2025. Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new technology will result in some new classics in the coming years - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle. This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of an issue.
• ativzzz 1y ago
  It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc
• corimaith 1y ago
  The consumption of media is exponential, if you read something good and you expect more from a genre, the number of consumable works quickly dwindles down to the point that you often end up waiting for new works. In the same way, as people get a better understanding of their own preferences, entire subgenres will become less relevant. That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
• intuitionist 1y ago
  This might prove too much, particularly for the case of literature. There were people writing commercially successful and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes, plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think there’s books published in the last 50 years that deserves a place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don’t think it has much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being published at that time.
• thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers. There is a lot of supply, but language change makes existing books impossible to read over time. You're always limited to whatever's been made in the last X years.
• simianwords 1y ago
  This reason doesn’t seem to be correct. Why do we have so many YouTube videos published that still garner views? Why TV shows? We still make culturally relevant movies every year. Why? Books don’t need to compete with all previous books but just have to be culturally relevant now.
  • HeartStrings 1y ago
    Novelty bias.
• palmfacehn 1y ago
  Culture evolves. There's no accounting for taste. Putting aside the issues with manipulated IMDB ratings, look at the volume of Marvel movies ranked equal or better than classics like "Vertigo" or "Lawrence of Arabia". Film lovers (or perhaps snobs?) feel jaded about recent output. Pop culture dictates that superhero movies are more accessible. The coarsening of culture is a continual, evergreen observation.
• foxglacier 1y ago
  I've wondered about this with children's books. Classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows are still wildly popular. I can't believe nobody has been able to write anything better since those days. It must exist but I've never managed to find them in the library or know how to find them among the tidal wave of slop. Most of them are very similar and, to me, low quality fluff with no nuanced characters, no rich fantasy worlds, no serious human interactions. 80% of what I can find is just stories about kids playing in their house or dealing with some basic child problems like losing a toy. The other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into children's books. Why do authors crank out so much low-quality crap instead of masterpieces?
  • randcraw 1y ago
    IMO, a large part of the appeal of classics is that you know others have also read the book so there will be opportunities to quote from it and share the experience, perhaps for decades to come. In contrast, most recent best sellers disappear off the radar so quickly that the reader knows the opportunity to share them will be ephemeral. This if you can't enjoy the reading experience of a recent work all by yourself, without sharing it with others, then your only hope to share it socially is to join a book club that reads it.
    • foxglacier 1y ago
      For adult books maybe, but my child often chooses classic stories like those over piles of modern books that we also have. She doesn't know they're popular yet.
  • watwut 1y ago
    I assure you there are more interesting books for children. At least judged by the "do kids actually want to read it" factor. I do not know "The Wind in the Willows", but Alice in Wonderland is not all that interesting. I mean, the philosophy parts were good, but the storyline something to be skipped. > 80% of what I can find is just stories about kids playing in their house or dealing with some basic child problems like losing a toy. You are talking about books for very small kids here. At that age, they were not understanding Alice in Wonderland. But, the small ones actually liked those losing a toy books. > The other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into children's books. Kids books and entertainment was always vehicle for teaching kids rights and wrongs. You have that in Narnia, you have that in Thomas the Tank Engine, you have that in pretty much any Christian kids books. The moralizing ethical aspect is especially clear when you look at older books, because distance makes it all that more apparent. Even Alice in Wonderland is meant to teach you philosophy first rather then be just a story.
• reedlaw 1y ago
  The authors of those works (Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov) were greatly influenced by Greek classics, Milton, Shakespeare, or their contemporaries (such as Charles Dickens) who were also shaped by some of those same sources. > At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65. > Literary fiction peaked on the charts in the 1950s and 1960s and was quite present before then. There was a sustained decline from the 1970s onward. Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary environment. How could we expect them to compete with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded or read?
  • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary environment. How could we expect them to compete with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded or read? You are operating under the asumption that the issue is authors. I think the issue is the readership. Great books are still being written. They are just not widely read anymore. The problem is that it's easier to mindlessly scroll through Instagram or watch meaningless YouTube videos than take the time to read a book. There are large teams dedicated to ensuring this stays so and that these products are as addictive as they can be. We, as a society, have apparently decided that it's acceptable to turn a large part of the population into idiots to sell more detergents. It's sad but at least we are selfdestructing through global warming so the problem will have an end.
    • marcus_holmes 1y ago
      That is the hypothesis that the author debunks in the second half of the article - that there are no readers any more because smartphones. And they debunk it by pointing out that classic literary fiction is still being read, it's just contemporary literary fiction that isn't being read (and then they go on to hypothesise that it's this very attitude that is killing contemporary literary fiction readership). I find it ironic that your comment laments the inability of readers to actually read, while failing to actually read the article that you're commenting on.
• crossroadsguy 1y ago
  At this point I honestly feel the same about those books as I did later in life when I did that IMDb top 250 in college. I wish I would have read "different" books when growing up. But I guess that's how you go to somewhere — gradually. It's a bit like how I read a lot and if it were not for those not so-literary pulp fiction books and cheap action comics, I would have never picked up reading. A lot has to do with language in those books. They read as kind of "foundational" and well structured (and I am speaking exclusively about English and Hindi classics, two languages I can read and write in). This gradually takes you on a journey of not only enjoying the language but also learning it. From there, different people branch off in various literary directions, and majority just drops off from the literary journey altogether.
• sotix 1y ago
  This exactly why I push back to people such as Sam Altman making the claim that AI will allow us to create more art, which people want. Do people truly want or need that?
  • dsr_ 1y ago
    Turns out that most people enjoy the process of creating art themselves, with any tools that are available. It's a nearly universal method of human expression. This is completely orthogonal to whether anyone else likes that art or finds it valuable.
• BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  You point out the exact reason why I am so blasé about the potential for AI art and (back in the Bush years) rampant piracy to destroy creative fields. Who cares? We already have multiple lifetimes of quality work to enjoy.
• joshvm 1y ago
  Music is a lot easier than visual media or books though. You can listen to new songs daily and have a good knowledge of the last century's music. It's also easy to listen and concentrate while doing something else, like walking or driving. You don't need light either. Films are a 1-2 hour commitment. A TV series could be anywhere from 10-100 hours. A novella might be a couple of hours, but most people would take at least a day to read a novel. And these need close to 100% attention. Reading all the Hugo winners at a book a week would take 1.5 years, and you've not touched the nominees or books in series.