Our book club has actually noted that more and more mainstream books are written for low attention span. Repeating details ad nauseum and simplifying the plot significantly. So I don't think books are immune to this automatically.
I am not sure that that's recent. Most books, even before the internet, were kind of low-effort shit.
You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
I would argue there is some recency: it used to be the case that editors were working with authors in the sense of building their careers. Not even 10 years ago it could be expected an author might not hit it big until their 3rd or 4th book (George RR Martin was like this) and editors were focused on building the skills of their authors in storytelling. Now editors are also pulled in a billion different directions and work more like project managers on way too many books at a time, and things like typos and whatnot are being introduced into traditionally published books with glossy special edition covers.
alansaber · · focus · HN ↗
robertclaus · · focus · HN ↗
tombert · · focus · HN ↗
You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
cattenwallen · · focus · HN ↗