I think one of the under-discussed pieces to the “nobody reads anymore” puzzle is that consolidation and financialization in the publishing industry means that, well. A lot of books just fucking suck, now.
Yes, independent publishing is easier than ever (lol plug), but has the same problem of indie everything, which is that it’s mostly only the purview of people who are already interested in reading weird niche books. It doesn’t help the reach and engagement issue.
@alis yeah admittedly the most recent one was just…wildly repetitive in a “this book could have easily cut a quarter of its wordcount and lost zero meaning” which is totally the kind of thing a good editor could handle but who knows whether a big 5 publishing house would actually bother these days
@Satsuma@glitch.cat.family I probably have a somewhat different opinion about that but it depends on what "glaring issue" is? Because having gone through the "Big 5 editing" process, my general opinion is it's good for, a) copyediting and formatting (which are different things to editing editing), and b) smoothing off "rough edges" to make works more in line with whatever the house style thinks "commercially palatable" fiction currently is.
But b) is the thing I have the fundamental problem with, and if you look at a lot of the works that are now considered classics (in any media, really)... they're mostly pretty fucking rough and janky? And that's what I think modern commercial publishing is missing out on, when everything it churns out is basically the equivalent of overproduced pop or Marvel franchise films, just in book form?