Why We're All Reading the Same Books Again
A few decades ago, the publishing industry feared fragmentation. Now the opposite has happened. Every reader, somehow, has read the same five books.
Walk into any independent bookstore in any large city this spring and you will see, near the front, the same small stack of titles. The covers are different — different colors, different fonts — but the books themselves are uncannily similar. Literary fiction with an unreliable female narrator. A memoir about grief. A nonfiction book about attention. Two or three thrillers with one-word titles.
This is strange, because the internet was supposed to do the opposite.
The promise that didn't happen
In the early 2010s, the consensus among publishing analysts was that the internet would shatter literary culture into a million niches. Without the gatekeeping of traditional reviewers and big-box stores, readers would scatter into specialized communities, each reading their own books, none of them reading the same ones.
The opposite happened. A handful of social platforms — first Goodreads, then BookTok, then a small set of newsletter writers with very large audiences — became more powerful as recommendation engines than the old gatekeepers ever were.
What's driving the convergence
Three forces, working together:
- Algorithmic recommendation. TikTok's For You page in particular has shown an ability to make individual books into global phenomena in weeks.
- Newsletter culture. A few dozen writers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers can move books to the bestseller list overnight.
- Risk-averse publishing. Houses that cannot predict what will work increasingly buy books that resemble what just worked.
The result is a literary culture that is wider than it used to be — more voices, more perspectives — but also strangely narrower. Most readers, even devoted ones, are reading inside a fairly small circle.
What to do about it
If you would like to read something nobody is talking about, the trick is the same as it has always been: walk into a library, pick a section you do not usually visit, and pull down a book published more than ten years ago.
There are good ones there. The algorithm just has not heard of them.
