Commentary
Instant summaries sound the death knell for the bullet-point books that prey on our insecurities, says Emma Jacobs for the Financial Times.
ChatGPT and other GenAI is proving to be dangerous for the self-help industry. (Photo: iStock)
23 Jun 2026 05:58AM
LONDON: Want to pick up seven habits to become highly effective? Win friends and influence people? Okay, how about discovering who moved your cheese?You could buy a self-help book, or, cheaper and quicker, just ChatGPT the highlights. According to self-help guru Tim Ferriss – author of The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape The 9–5, Live Anywhere and Join The New Rich – generative AI is killing the how-to publishing industry.Recently, Ferriss wrote in a blog post: “Using my own books as the cadaver on the table, [this is] what a fatality looks like,” mapping out sales for his five books, including The 4-Hour Body and Tools Of Titans (my favourite title of the last 10 years). His chart showed a small dip in 2023, the year after ChatGPT was launched, followed by ever-steeper declines. Ominously, he predicted his catalogue “will sell roughly 80 per cent fewer copies in 2026 than it did in 2022”.Perhaps his readers are just following his own advice? “Doing less”, he wrote in 4HWW, “is the path of the productive”. In any case, as he put it in the recent blog post, in words that will depress bibliophiles everywhere, he “never got into writing because of unit economics [but] because a book is the highest-density transfer of obsession I know”.
