[HN Gopher] Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the fu...
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Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of
narrative nonfiction
Author : Hooke
Score : 47 points
Date : 2026-03-25 20:56 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newrepublic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newrepublic.com)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the original title is: Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is
| More Important Than Ever
|
| which totally fits, did HN's title algorithm cut that off? If so
| it seems silly. "Than ever" is an important modifier, otherwise
| someone is apt to think that the subject is more important than
| some other opposing subject, in this case that Nonfiction
| publishing is more important than fiction publishing. Anyway I
| think the "than ever" should be added back in
| Gander5739 wrote:
| It's not a title algorithm, it's a character limit.
| jhbadger wrote:
| There isn't a technical reason why titles have to be that
| short, memory isn't in that short supply despite the RAM
| shortages. A function, therefore an algorithm, is deciding to
| truncate the title for some reason.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Which you find to be the reasonable explanation over just
| OP editorializing the title with their own hands
| because...?
| jfengel wrote:
| Because the edited title is incoherent and grammatically
| incorrect.
|
| Until recently that would have marked it as likely done
| by simplistic automation. These days, it's hard to tell,
| because humans seem more likely to make simple errors of
| grammar.
| harshreality wrote:
| Full title, "...than ever": 64 characters
|
| Another title currently on the front page has 74 characters:
| "The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert
| Trivers (1943-2026)"
| Gander5739 wrote:
| I stand corrected.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| no, as I indicated the full title is within the character
| limit, to test it I opened up a submit form and it did not
| say the title was too long.
| mitchbob wrote:
| > Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of
| narrative nonfiction, and our understanding of the world around
| us.
|
| https://archive.ph/2026.03.23-164808/https://newrepublic.com...
| stogot wrote:
| > Nonfiction books are a crucial bulwark against the surging
| public culture of "alternative facts," outright lies, and the
| brazen embrace of ignorance.
|
| Do they believe someone cannot lie because it's written down in a
| paperback? Authors lie in books and books do nothing to help
| someone who "embraces" ignorance
| bondarchuk wrote:
| This was dead, I vouched for it, I think it's a good point.
| Form does not determine the truthfulness of content.
| jfengel wrote:
| It does nod in its direction, though. Or at least it used to.
| Mass production printing was high overhead, and publishers
| had reputations to protect. That wasn't perfect but they'd
| usually try to avoid the worst propaganda.
|
| (Or at least shove it off onto an imprint with less of a
| reputation. Or into a category, like Self Help, where people
| know its shaky relationship to truth.)
|
| It was far from perfect. But these days the publishing
| gatekeepers have largely lost the battle. People prefer the
| hot takes they get from tv and social media.
| thfuran wrote:
| Printed propaganda goes back at least as far as the early
| 1500s, and written propaganda goes back thousands of years.
| qsera wrote:
| They can lie, but that lie will remain in the books that have
| gone into circulation. A lie on the internet can be reversed or
| erased after it has been consumed by millions of human eye
| balls.
| falcor84 wrote:
| We generally consider it a good thing that written falsehoods
| can be amended to instead say the truth. That's what we do
| with book errata and editions too.
|
| The bigger issue is the attempt to rewrite history as if the
| falsehood was never there, which is in my opinion a much
| bigger lie. As I see it, this can be handled by third party
| archives and by us as a society actually attaching
| repercussions to such outright lying.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Which is why the Internet Archive, and similar, more
| specialized services are so important.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Indeed, I became aware of various conspiracy theories and woo
| through books and newspapers in the 90s
| bthallplz wrote:
| From what I've heard through self-publishing media, nowadays,
| traditional publishing isn't even particularly disposed towards
| pushing back on things like these. They might even be all for
| publishing works based on outright lies if there's an existing
| customer base with open wallets.
|
| Supposedly traditional publishing has become more and more
| conservative (not necessarily politically) with the risks they
| take on things they publish, so they'd be less likely to push
| back against widely-held ideas that are outright wrong. They'll
| really only publish authors with an established following or
| works that have a large base of interested consumers.
|
| Edit: I just wanted to add that since I've heard these things
| so much, going to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble feels super
| weird. The books look nice, but they're all expensive and I
| have no sense that the selection has been curated for genuine
| quality or informational content. It's just what happens to
| being published now.
|
| I greatly prefer the experience of going to thrift stores like
| Goodwill where the selection is chaotic, there's no real
| expectation of curation aside from maybe broad categories, and
| the books are gloriously cheap. You can find great stuff there!
| Finnucane wrote:
| I spent years as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor. One of
| the reasons I don't so much any more is I was getting too many
| political books, books where the authors were not so interested
| in facts or logic--or even internal consistency. Most of these
| books were 'conservative' but this was not exclusively a right-
| wing issue. Ideology requires glossing over the complexity of
| the real world. It's draining to read this stuff, with limited
| ability to make corrections.
|
| Hell, now I work for a uni press, and I'm seeing this in our
| own list more and more--writers are giving up on deep analysis.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| The author clearly means professional publishers, who have
| editors and fact-checkers. Self-published books already lack
| trust. The reply also misses several other points the author
| makes, which I find ironic because it kind of goes into the
| direction the author bemoans: The author wrote a longer article
| to lay out his thoughts and it sure took him time to write and
| any reader time to read and digest and here is a quick oneliner
| as a rebuttal that took no time and effort and is superficial.
| abeppu wrote:
| Do publishers really have fact-checkers? My understanding was
| that support for authors is now relatively minimal, even for
| established authors, and no one really has the time or
| resources to second-guess everything an author has claimed. I
| take as a key example Naomi Wolf learning after her book was
| "done" that a significant chunk of it was based on a
| misunderstanding of an admittedly confusing 19th century
| British legal phrase.
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/naomi-wolfs-book-
| cor...
|
| I think maybe the idea that a single author spending months
| or years on their research, which the publish as a single
| bound and polished work is misguided -- an academic trying to
| do similar work in multiple articles would have gotten review
| from peers on each article, and hopefully have not spent so
| much time working under a correctable misunderstanding.
| jfengel wrote:
| Fact checking as a separate job is more for journalism than
| books. But editors have fact checking as part of their
| jobs. (It is not copy-editing, which is a different job.)
|
| Many nonfiction authors will hire a fact checker
| separately. They don't want to look like they missed
| something. Errors still happen, of course.
| simianwords wrote:
| I find that the kind of people who obsess the conspiracy of
| "alternative facts" are the same people who uncritically take
| everything presented by modern science as truth. Except when it
| comes to economics of course!
| perching_aix wrote:
| Do you picture millions reading science journals, or are you
| willfully conflating media reporting as what's "presented by
| modern science as truth"?
|
| In my impression people peddling distrust in modern science
| are not exactly in it to improve its honesty, nor are they
| calling out genuine gaps most of the time. It's more a side
| effect if and when it happens at all, with the actual goal
| being political control play instead.
| simianwords wrote:
| > In my impression people peddling distrust in modern
| science are not exactly in it to improve its honesty, nor
| are they calling out genuine gaps most of the time.
|
| I agree, but in this case I'm trying to be the person who's
| trying to improve its honesty. There's so many lies in
| modern non fiction (and science) and I hope they will all
| be uncovered soon and a nice post-mortem will take place.
| It is important to understand how much we were misled.
|
| This is after all the scientific process and it will
| continue and get better - I have no doubt in it.
|
| I'm trying to clarify my position here: I won't name them
| but there are obvious things that non fiction (by elite
| academics) got wrong before but were only uncovered as
| wrong when society evolved to understand the subject matter
| intricately enough to criticise it. Until then we all had
| to pretend as if the elite academics pushing their jargon
| laded slop in non fiction columns as obviously correct.
|
| I don't want to go on a tangent here but an important part
| of uncovering truth is by the emergent property of a
| critical mass of people understanding a concept. Society
| itself takes part in uncovering truth. Until then elite
| academics either produce gems or slop because there's only
| so much intelligence that comes from a single person (or a
| few people).
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| People who question modern science don't have a higher
| epistemic standard.
|
| They just offer something worse, like a youtuber who
| convinced them that eating plants was bad for them.
| simianwords wrote:
| >People who question modern science don't have a higher
| epistemic standard.
|
| I hope this changes. There is much need to question modern
| science using a higher epistemic standard.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Some of the biggest lies in history where, indeed, made with
| books. Examples go from "Malleus Maleficarum" to "Mein Kampf"
| to even "Chariots of the Gods".
|
| But there is a difference in efficacy. It is harder to lie in
| books than it is in social media. Books are like trees, they
| grow slowly, they're a discourse that spans months or years. On
| this timeframe it is easier to debunk lies. Social media is
| different. A lie can pop and spread there in one or 2 days.
| Once someone debunks it there are already 200 more replacing
| it. They are like bacterial infestations or japanese knotweed,
| much harder to combat and control.
| diego_moita wrote:
| I am worried.
|
| I do agree that the bigger picture of learning non-fiction is
| richer. We now have other ways to learn non-fiction: Wikipedia,
| Veritasium, Gemini, etc.
|
| But only books can provide you something we may call a "coherent
| worldview". They are the ones that stitch together different
| pictures into a coherent whole.
|
| I can think of a lot of books that gave me that: E.Gombrich's
| "Story of Art", Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", ...
| honestly, even Julia Childs' "Mastering the Art of French
| Cooking" or Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" (his other books are crap,
| b.t.w.).
|
| True, we still have universities' textbooks. But they're very
| narrow in scope.
|
| The thing about non-fiction books is that nothing else can
| provide the same combination of depth and scope.
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(page generated 2026-03-29 23:01 UTC)