My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago.
For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that “adult nonfiction” was down 9% from Q1 2025. Who knows… maybe in line with historical fluctuations?
Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio.
| Year | Year-Over-Year |
| 2022 | baseline |
| 2023 | -5% |
| 2024 | -13% |
| 2025 | -46% |
| 2026 (run-rate) | -57% vs. 2025 |
Let that sink in for a minute.
Think about what my books are, functionally speaking.
If “how-to” books are getting crushed because LLMs seem to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized advice… What’s next on the chopping block? Or, what is vulnerable to being replaced by AI-generated alternatives?
My position—and I’d genuinely love to be wrong—is yes, prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine, and the coal mine is enormous. I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.
Will anything survive in roughly its current form?
A confession: part of me finds this clarifying.
Why?
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Agree? Disagree? Different angle? Please let me know in the comments here.