Kieran Snyder shared a LinkedIn post on the future of writing books in business and non-fiction in general—considering the changes in readers’ books reading behavior. With the rise of Agentic AI and AI summarizing tools, the book readers can quickly find and read book’s key takeaways, the summary, and the message, within minutes.
Kieren says—”Since general-purpose AIs are not paying authors to train on their content, it quickly stops making economic sense for people to write this kind of book.“
The shift in reading habits have been making news for a while now. I remember reading Marc Watkins writing a Substack post on Reading in the age of social media (AI).
We see new tools designed for the prompt based digital experiences in other walks of life such as for while using search, or in inline shopping. The books authors might not be complete control to stop the AI summarizing tools working on their books.
So we might see a new category of business books (or of the authors) where the authors plan and write the books in the language of Q&A—a series of prompts for a certain topic and then the model carries forward the same structure across the chapters and topics in the book.
It means a new and parallel publishing industry for this new category of books or authors and which specifically caters to these new books reading culture. These books will be designed for the machines too—for the structure and the metadata to make it referenceable accurately by the machines.
However, the traditional and evergreen books will continue to work for the conventional readers.
