The author is indeed talking about non-fiction books, but, more specifically, a genre of books that I call "airport books". These are mass-market self-help, HBR fanfic, blogposts, that are bound and sold as books.<p>There's a whole higher echelon of non-fiction books that are more like academic books targeting a learned mass culture. These are often academic books with all or most of the footnotes and citations shaved off. Or they're just incredibly well written non-fiction storytelling, like the books of David McCullough, to give one example. Another: the essays by Mark Grief (even his one academic monograph is a stellar read by the standards of academic writing).<p>> Because we have too many books already, and publishing as a status play pollutes the information environment.<p>Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries. The "too many books" argument runs into, I believe, an unspoken desire by the writer. Eventually you begin to notice what's worth reading and what isn't. You begin to trust certain publishers and writers over others. You begin to cultivate your own tastes and filter. Sometimes, you also just want a syllabus that lays out the "major works" in a field for you. Sometimes you want to find that out for yourself. Which is all to say, this writer seems to be asking for only something like Wikipedia or fiction, with non-fiction books dissolved and absorbed into the former. But one of the best parts of non-fiction writing <i>is</i> the author's point of view, their personality, their voice.