OLD AND BUSTED: “Give the People What They Want.”

The new hotness? Why publishers stopped caring about their readers.

It was easy to choose books for my young nieces and nephews this Christmas. First, I ruled out stories about boys who think they are girls, girls who dream of having their breasts removed and pet rabbits unhappy at being misgendered.

Then I rejected books telling toddlers how to be anti-racist and older children how to be allies to their black classmates. Feminist manuals on women who changed the world, all of which feature at least one woman who was actually male, went the same way as history books that divide the past into tales of victimized black people and evil white people. Worthy tomes about climate change, rising sea levels and Greta Thunberg were also discarded. By this point, with so few books remaining, the choice was all but made for me.

It turns out I am not alone in this book-selection method. Although publishers insist upon churning out fashionable woke thinking, the public is just not buying it. Take Page Boy, actor Elliot Page’s gender transition memoir. Page secured a whopping $3 million for the book but, according to the sales tracker BookScan, only 68,000 print copies have been sold. Readers, it seems, are less than enthusiastic. The same goes for Claudia Craven’s novel, Lucky Red. Only 3,500 copies of this “queer feminist western” have shifted, despite Craven receiving a $500,000 advance.

To be fair, publishers are definitely doing a service to the environment by publishing books that no one wants to read: Book Publishers Go Green To Reduce Their Carbon Footprint. In the United States alone, the publishing industry uses about 32 million trees annually to make books. On top of that, producing books emits over 40 million metric tons of C02 each year.

By knowing ahead of time that they’ll be releasing a book that no one will be buying, publishers can save many, many trees! (At least until the laws of economics finally catch up with them.)