Publishing Has a Hologram Problem. And It’s Growing.

If you’ve ever walked through a bookstore with an author by your side, you may have noticed something peculiar: writers don’t check out new books the way normal people do. Your average reader, when they pick up a book, will first inspect the cover, then they will read the synopsis, and finally they will glance at the author photo, cruelly appraising the hair and skin and posture of a subspecies of human (Homo scriptor) that largely prefers to remain out of sight. In other words, they will never actually open the book before they buy it. A writer, by contrast, wise to the Draperian deceptions of jacket copy, tends to open it to the first page, take a quick sip of its prose, and if they like it, then and only then will they endeavor to learn what the book is actually about.

Authors understand that every book is, in truth, two books. There is the book a writer writes, which is to say the actual words on the page, and then there is what I call its hologram, the shimmering, ethereal version of the book that the author must pitch to their publisher, and which their publisher then pitches to the public. Writers tend to find this process, reducing a complex, nuanced work of art down to a tidy cartoon version of itself, excruciating. But we are forced to do it, because no one can read a whole book before they buy it.

Put simply, people don’t buy books. They buy holograms, and they hope the book matches up.

Some of the great books throughout history have had a hard time finding a wide readership, at least at first, because they had a faulty hologram: The book itself is brilliant, but the title, the synopsis, even the cover image leave buyers cold. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass famously took six years before it reached the Times bestseller list, where it now resides more or less permanently. Some of my favorite novels, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Norman Rush’s Mating, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, are ones I put off reading for years, simply because the title sounded fusty, even though the books themselves are anything but. Eventually, truly great books tend to outgrow their drab holograms and reach a wide audience, but it takes time, labor, and good luck.

Sometimes, the inverse is true: the book itself is drek, but the hologram is a work of art. I recently ran across a book called Infinite Jeffs, which is the reductio ad absurdum of this phenomenon. In it, the author replaces every word in the novel Infinite Jest with the word “Jeff”: the result is 776 pages filled with nothing but “Jeff jeff jeff jeff,” and so on. It isn’t a book any human alive will ever read from front to back, but as a hologram, it’s devilishly clever.

Readers are swiftly losing any regard for the line between hologram and book, between map and territory.

It is no secret that publishing is currently experiencing a crisis. One genre of books, “serious nonfiction,” or, more colloquially, “dad books”, seem to be especially hard hit, as readers retreat en masse from the gnarly complexities of history into works of cozy fantasy. “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” the publisher Jonathan Karp told the Wall Street Journal. “This is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world.”

The pat explanation for this shift is that people are just too busy, too broke, and too brain-melted to read serious books any more. On top of that, the wider media ecosystem is going through what is being called a “discoverability crisis.” Book review sections are evaporating; NPR has been eviscerated; and social media followings no longer seem to be reliably converting into book sales.

However, I suspect that the source of the problem is both stranger and deeper than that. I fear that readers are swiftly losing any regard for the line between hologram and book, between map and territory. The trouble is not that the publishing industry has failed to create compelling holograms in order to effectively market books; it’s that the holograms have become so effective that we are unconsciously training readers not to want to read. Instead of book reviews, which, by dint of their brevity, are forced to strike a balance between describing the book and giving it all away for free, holograms now reach readers in the form of podcast interviews, which chew over the contents of a given book for one or even two hours, sucking every morsel from its bones. Some authors even go a step further, agreeing to flay and anatomize their own books, breaking them down into a tidy list of “key insights” aimed at busy professionals. I recently performed one such act of ritual self-cannibalism, known (aptly) as a Book Bite, distilling a work that took me nine years to write into a listicle that takes mere minutes to consume. (Then, for good measure, I took that Book Bite and posted a nibble of it on my Instagram.)

Increasingly, and far more insidiously, holograms come in the form of AI. Amazon has instituted a feature called “Ask This Book,” which allows you to interrogate the app about the contents of the text, and then, if you so choose, skip reading it altogether. A few months ago, the author and podcaster Tyler Cowan launched his new book, The Marginal Revolution, onto his website, in full, along with an “integrated AI assistant” that pre-digests the prose for you, like a mother bird regurgitating food into the maw of her chicks. As of the time of this writing, almost four months after its publication, the text still contains a typo in its opening lines, suggesting to me that no one close to the author has even bothered to read it with care.

I recently embarked on a month-long book tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Along the way, I stopped off to meet up with friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. What nearly everyone I spoke with told me, in one form or another, is that they are feeling the effects of a holographic crisis that extends far beyond the publishing industry. I spoke with a friend who, unable to find time to read whole books, has begun to run PDFs through an AI program that converts them into podcasts, complete with two chatty humanoid voices. I talked with a literary agent who said that her clients, fearing their book proposal will be read first by AI before it ever encounters human eyeballs, are tweaking their proposals to suit robotic tastes, much as magazines tailor their headlines to game social media algorithms. And I talked with a Hollywood producer who caught a studio exec pretending to have read a script, when it was clear he’d used AI to summarize it. (She knew this for a fact, because the LLM had mistaken the plotline of a novel within the script for the plot of the film itself.)

In Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard famously explored the perils of living in a world of holograms. The book opens with an epigraph from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth, it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” This, as any reader with a functioning brain cell left in their skull knows, is not an actual quote from the Bible. Baudrillard is playing a little textual prank on us, inserting the simulacrum of a quotation into a book about simulacra. But he is also, I think, making a deep, if deeply cynical, observation about the nature of truth itself.

Holograms are not a product of the digital or even the industrial age, people were creating them in biblical times as well, each time they spoke in concrete terms about the ineffable nature of the divine. There has always been a temptation to give up worrying over questions of falsity and authenticity, because isn’t everything a hologram, really, when you think about it? Baudrillard gave into that temptation so fully that he made an art out of it. But I refuse to, and I hope you do, too. Down that road, darkness lies.

Nearly every author and editor I know feels that our present holographic crisis is merely a wan prelude of what’s to come: a tsunami of texts wholly written by AI, flooding the earth with books without authors, holograms piled atop holograms, with no ground-truth beneath them. “A fool also multiplies words,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns. “At the beginning their words are folly; at the end they are wicked madness.”