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As much as booktok and shallow publishing trends annoy me, I think people are only really outraged bc they view books as some sacred bastion of intelligence and culture rather than like. A vehicle of entertainment and information just like movies, shows, podcasts etc. don’t get me wrong, the change in the industry is alarming and really harms authors, but this is the same exact trend we see in all other mass media. Books are not more inherently ‘high brow’ than other forms of media, they just engage different parts of how you think because you have to read them rather than watch. And shitty shallow books always been widely available for mass entertainment ever since people could read on a large scale. That is inherently morally neutral. The crime of modern publishing and booktok isn’t that it disgraces a cult of the page, but that it leaves authors in the dust when it comes to marketing and promo