There is (isn’t there always?) a crisis in nonfiction publishing. But this time it really is a crisis, or at least, it seems more of a crisis than the previous ones. The problem is: not enough people are buying the stuff anymore. Last year’s nonfiction sales were down fully six per cent on the 2024 figures, and the long-term graph gives a picture of consistent, rapid, decline.

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who host the superb podcast The Rest Is History, are part of the problem as well as part of the solution

Woe to the world. As someone who has skin in the game – not a lot of skin, admittedly; more like one of those sore bits you get when you’ve been chewing the corner of your thumb – this grieves me. Some of us, who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, saw the nonfiction shelves of the library as the intellectual world’s equivalent of the city on the hill.

Here was the sum of the world’s knowledge, filtered and distilled in each case by the individual voice, prose and sensibility of great writers who had put in countless hours researching and weighing the results of their research. Wikipedia may, in some sense, make more of the world’s store of knowledge available than ever before – and a great boon that is, too – but a well-organised pile of facts is a different proposition from a library of nonfiction books.

The problem now is not just about quantity: it’s about type. Such nonfiction as is being sold is not of the sort that I describe above. The only four nonfiction books to make it into last year’s top twenty........

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