The year of indifferent thinking

十二月 29, 2025
Tags: #publishing #movie

As one who earn one's income partly through editorial work, I have subscribed many Wechat channels operated by publishers and publish industry media. For the past year, none of the stories they published managed to make me interested, not to mention excited, about any of the books. Many others must have a similar take about books: everyone in the publishing business know 2025 was the worst year in their career so far, no matter if their career is short or long. For several consecutive years, there have been small but significant decrease in book sales and revenue across genres. Non-fiction were hit especially hard.

One of the authors I know mentioned on social media last week, that she haven't bought a single book in 2025. We editors and authors are supposed to be book devourers! And it's not only books that fail to excite people. When was the last time a movie trailer made you want to go to the cinema?

An explanation to this dilemma is that the publishers of books and producers of movies are trying too hard to play safe. They want to minimize the risk of a flop, to maximize their survival chances in this very uncertain decade.

Superficially, this makes sense. But the demand side must have something to do with the situation as well. If playing safe brings absolute success, we should be seeing Avengers 5 in its Avengers 3 clone form already, as well as that it become the most profitable one in history. The ultimate "play-it-safe" movie was Avatar, whose success was not reproducible perhaps for the rest of the century. It is that the current publishers/producers reacted to the loss of interests by playing safe, not the other way round.

Fewer people are paying for books and movies. The market size is shrinking. That's why books and movies are playing it safe. When the market cannot support so many SKUs, any manufacturer would limit themselves to the tried and true formula. So would publishers and filmmakers.

Yet, that was also only superficially true. In 1998 there was the Asian Financial Crisis, and we have The Matrix in 1999 and tLoR around 2000. In 2008 there was a bigger recession thanks to greedy banks, and we have Avatar the next year. Things were not boring then and people had not interests but hypes on everything Hollywood, Penguin and even EA produced.

Business is bad but that usually don't stop people from paying for stuff that can bring them laughters, tears, and maybe some soul-searching.

The reason that people find today's content boring, is that we are not so sure about that the truth exists, and that we can identify the truth, anymore. If we don't believe a book or a movie contains some truth that we want to know or identify with, we lose interest in it.

We need to believe the truth is in there, to ask the right or wrong questions, and the why questions. These questions are the reasons behind the story's allure.

Social media was a heavy blow to the belief. The fact that anyone can tell anyone anything about anything, means that it is anyone's job to identify truth. It is a tiring job that exhausts many even if it is paid. After 20 years of social media, everyone is tired. We don't share things because they are true but because we find them agreeable, or just fun.

And the LLM technology may be the second blow. Suddenly everyone can access from their pocket something that is mostly right, and almost factful. We have our doubts but choose to believe it when it churns out answers for ourselves. The doubts are reserved for news, books and movies we read and see. Somehow we believe the LLM chatbots are directly addressing us, and are more reliable than "the (mass) media", which we can't tell whether LLMs are involved or not.

So here we are. Apathy is a condition that we should not ignore. But luckily, as long as something is not completely AI slop, we can find something truthful in it, if not in the content itself, then the way it is packaged or delivered, or why we give it our time in the first place.