What is happening to publishing?
The big news in the world of writing today is the controversy over the award of a Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize to a story called “The Serpent in the Grove.” The piece was almost certainly co-authored by AI.
当今写作界的大新闻是关于将英联邦基金会短篇小说奖授予名为“树林中的蛇”的故事的争议。这篇文章几乎可以肯定是由人工智能共同创作的。
As of this morning, the magazine that published the piece (the prestigious literary journal Granta ) has not issued a retraction .
截至今天上午，发表该文章的杂志（著名文学杂志《格兰塔》）尚未发表撤稿声明。
Rather stunningly, in fact, Granta has just issued a statement about the affair that cites Claude as an arbiter of whether the story was AI-written or not!
事实上，令人震惊的是，格兰塔刚刚就这件事发表了一份声明，并引用克劳德作为这个故事是否是人工智能编写的仲裁者！
More on the question of trust and experience later.
稍后将详细讨论信任和经验的问题。
Suffice to say that it does not take an AI-detection tool to spot the obvious ChatGPT-isms in the story.
可以说，不需要人工智能检测工具就能发现故事中明显的 ChatGPT 主义。
The dead giveaway is the repetition of bizarre figures of speech.
致命的泄露是奇怪修辞手法的重复。
Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.
混合的隐喻乍一看听起来不错，但是却像回声追赶悬崖一样偏离了意义。
Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.
比喻在你的脑海中浮现，就像河鳟鱼缠在红杉树的根部一样。
Literary flourishes that thicken the air’s tang with their…
文学的繁荣使空气的味道变得浓重……
ok you get the idea.
好吧，你明白了。
AI systems are especially given to talking about hums and other ambient sounds like static, as well as ambient environments (water, air, ozone).
人工智能系统特别擅长谈论嗡嗡声和其他环境声音（例如静态声音）以及周围环境（水、空气、臭氧）。
1 These are frequently pushed up against “earthy” words (tang, belly) and ennui-laden emotional states (longing, forgetting, sadness).
1 这些经常与“朴实”的词语（唐、肚皮）和充满倦怠的情绪状态（渴望、遗忘、悲伤）相对立。
Once you notice the patterns, they’re impossible to miss.
一旦你注意到这些模式，就不可能错过它们。
…air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa…
……空气像粥皮一样粘稠：潮湿的泥土、木烟和发酵可可的酸味……
…People passing said they sometimes heard the noon hum if the wind was in a mood.
……路过的人说，如果风有心情，他们有时会听到中午的嗡嗡声。
Not every day.
不是每天。
The day had to choose…
这一天必须选择...
This controversy is not yet finished, and will likely be repeating itself again, and again, in the months and years to come.
这场争论尚未结束，并且在未来的几个月和几年里可能会一次又一次地重演。
The issue is not just that authors are submitting AI-written prose, but that judges are using language models to assess that prose.
问题不仅在于作者提交了人工智能撰写的散文，还在于法官正在使用语言模型来评估该散文。
Anyone who has tried passing AI-produced writing to another AI tool (even in the context of coding — like asking Gemini to read a plan for a new feature produced by Claude) can attest that these tools simply adore their own outputs.
任何尝试过将人工智能生成的写作传递给另一个人工智能工具的人（即使是在编码的背景下——比如要求 Gemini 阅读 Claude 生成的新功能计划）都可以证明这些工具只是喜欢它们自己的输出。
For instance, here is Gemini 3.1 Pro, the current top model from Google, reasoning about whether it likes the Granta story.
例如，这里是 Gemini 3.1 Pro（Google 当前的顶级型号），推理它是否喜欢 Granta 故事。
What I find striking about this is that the features it identifies as the best aspects of the story are precisely the things that make me — as a human reader — think it’s astonishingly bad.
令我印象深刻的是，它被认为是故事最好的方面的特征恰恰让我——作为一个人类读者——认为它非常糟糕。
Gemini thinks the setting is “richly evoked” with well-drawn characters, whereas to me it feels like the story is floating in some kind of literary nether-region without any sense of place, character, or scene.
双子座认为这个场景是“丰富的唤起”，人物刻画得很好，而对我来说，感觉这个故事漂浮在某种文学的幽冥区域，没有任何地点、人物或场景的感觉。
And it finds the meaningless metaphors, like those highlighted above, to be “stunning.”
它发现那些毫无意义的隐喻，比如上面强调的那些，是“令人震惊的”。
There’s no way to prove that AI was used in the assessment process for this award, but in a world where universities and employers are moving toward language model-driven sorting of applicants, it certainly isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
无法证明该奖项的评估过程中使用了人工智能，但在大学和雇主正在转向语言模型驱动的申请人排序的世界中，这当然不是不可能的。
So wrote Tolstoy in 1886.
托尔斯泰在 1886 年如此写道。
His book of the same name was about the problem of poverty and social unrest in Russia.
他的同名著作涉及俄罗斯的贫困和社会动荡问题。
Here is an excerpt from it:
以下是其中的摘录：
A rich man must think and speak in scientific language, and, like the clergy formerly, he must offer sacrifices to the ruling class: he must publish magazines and books, provide himself with a picture-gallery, a musical society, a kindergarten or technical school…
一个富人必须用科学的语言思考和说话，并且像以前的神职人员一样，他必须为统治阶级做出牺牲：他必须出版杂志和书籍，为自己提供画廊、音乐协会、幼儿园或技术学校……
The class of men who now feel completely justified in freeing themselves from labour, is that of men of science, and particularly of experimental, positive, critical, evolutional science, and of artists who develop their ideas according to the same tendency.
现在觉得完全有理由把自己从劳动中解放出来的人是科学界人士，特别是实验科学、实证科学、批判科学、进化科学的人，以及按照同样趋势发展自己的想法的艺术家。
Tolstoy took it for granted that the new, post-Darwinian elites of artists and scientists would use their elevated social position not just to enjoy creature comforts, but to “publish magazines and books.” This, after all, was one of the ways that an elite became an elite.
托尔斯泰理所当然地认为，新的后达尔文主义艺术家和科学家精英不仅会利用他们较高的社会地位来享受物质享受，而且会“出版杂志和书籍”。毕竟，这是精英成为精英的方式之一。
Books were the venue for claiming intellectual space, for asserting oneself in a culture and in a moment in history.
书籍是主张知识空间、在文化和历史时刻中主张自己的场所。
Res Obscura is a reader-supported publication.
Res Obscura 是一本由读者支持的出版物。
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
要接收新帖子并支持我的工作，请考虑成为免费或付费订阅者。
Are they still?
他们还在吗？
(He wrote, plaintively, while asking you to subscribe to his Substack…).
（他哀怨地写道，同时要求你订阅他的子堆栈……）。
Witness the other big news in literary publishing this week: the continuing decline in sales of non-fiction books.
本周文学出版领域的另一则重大新闻就是见证：非小说类图书销量持续下滑。
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece on the topic which framed it as the demise of “dad history,” but that is just one part of the story.
《华尔街日报》最近发表了一篇有关该主题的文章，将其描述为“父亲历史”的消亡，但这只是故事的一部分。
Some raw numbers to orient us about how books are selling in 2026: the WSJ reports that Rites of the Starling , described as “the sequel to a bestselling romantasy novel by Devney Perry,” reached the top of the April New York Times bestseller list for fiction with 105,396 hardcover sales.
一些原始数据可以帮助我们了解 2026 年的图书销售情况：《华尔街日报》报道称，被描述为“德夫尼·佩里畅销浪漫小说的续集”的《椋鸟的仪式》以 105,396 册的精装本销量登上了《纽约时报》4 月份小说畅销书排行榜的榜首。
By comparison, the number one title in non-fiction, London Falling , by Patrick Radden Keefe, sold only 13,468 copies.
相比之下，排名第一的非小说类图书《伦敦陷落》（Patrick Radden Keefe 的作品）仅售出 13,468 册。
The declining cultural visibility of non-fiction books was noticeable before it started to show up in charts like the one below.
在非小说类书籍开始出现在如下图表中之前，其文化知名度的下降就已经很明显了。
It would be far too simple, in other words, to blame the post-2023 AI boom for something that has deeper roots.
换句话说，将 2023 年后的人工智能热潮归咎于具有更深层根源的事情就太简单了。
Generalized anxiety and distraction is part of the story here.
普遍的焦虑和分心是这里故事的一部分。
The CEO of Barnes and Noble is quoted in the article as saying: “The world is exceptionally interesting right now and when that happens, the nonfiction reader is reading the news instead.”
文章援引巴诺书店首席执行官的话说：“现在的世界异常有趣，当这种情况发生时，非小说类读者就会转而阅读新闻。”
I fear, though, that “watching shorts and asking ChatGPT instead” is probably more accurate.
不过，我担心“看短片并询问 ChatGPT”可能更准确。
LLMs and video content seem to me to be the most fearsome competitors of the non-fiction book, precisely because they aren’t even trying to compete on the same playing field.
在我看来，法学硕士和视频内容似乎是非小说类书籍最可怕的竞争对手，正是因为它们甚至没有试图在同一个竞争环境中竞争。
Because explainer-type YouTube videos make up a significant part of the training data for language models, both formats tend to share the same approach: “here’s everything you need to know” or “this matters because” type language, paired with pithy summaries (which may often be summarizing books!).
由于解释型 YouTube 视频构成了语言模型训练数据的重要组成部分，因此两种格式往往采用相同的方法：“这是您需要了解的所有内容”或“这很重要，因为”类型语言，搭配简洁的摘要（通常可能是总结书籍！）。
Et tu, Substack?
等等，子堆栈？
Reflecting on my own habits over the past few years, it’s clear that I am shifting some of my reading time from legacy publications to Substack writers.
反思过去几年我自己的习惯，很明显我正在将一些阅读时间从传统出版物转向 Substack 作家。
At the same time, though, these writers are often using their platform to write, sell, and engagingly discuss printed books ( Lincoln Michel and Daniel Lavery come to mind).
但与此同时，这些作家经常利用他们的平台来写作、销售和热烈讨论印刷书籍（我想到了林肯·米歇尔和丹尼尔·拉弗里）。
Above all, it seems publishers want to blame podcasts.
最重要的是，出版商似乎想把责任归咎于播客。
The WSJ reports: “Sixty-two percent of men and 54% of women consumed a podcast in the prior month, according to a recent survey by Edison Research at SSRS, up from 46% and 39%, respectively, in 2023.”
《华尔街日报》报道称：“根据 SSRS 爱迪生研究中心最近的一项调查，62% 的男性和 54% 的女性在上个月观看了播客，高于 2023 年的 46% 和 39%。”
And here’s a quote from Jonathan Burnham, president of Harper Group, a core group of imprints for the “Big 5” publisher HarperCollins:
以下是哈珀集团 (Harper Group) 总裁乔纳森·伯纳姆 (Jonathan Burnham) 的一句话：哈珀集团是“五巨头”出版商哈珀柯林斯 (Harper Collins) 的核心集团。
When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts.
当我们召开内部会议讨论这个问题时，总是会涉及到播客。
The man who wants to read American history is now tuning into one of the many good podcasts about history that lends the quiet attention to a serious subject he’s looking for.
想要阅读美国历史的人现在正在收听众多有关历史的优秀播客之一，该播客可以安静地关注他正在寻找的严肃主题。
It makes the idea of sitting down with a 700-page Ron Chernow book less appealing.
这使得坐下来阅读一本 700 页罗恩·切尔诺 (Ron Chernow) 的书的想法变得不那么有吸引力了。
You’ve scratched that itch.
你已经解决了这个问题。
I can’t disagree — though, as with Substack, the story is not simple.
我不能不同意——不过，就像 Substack 一样，故事并不简单。
In my own experience, there are genuine cross-pollinations across the media formats.
根据我自己的经验，各种媒体格式之间存在着真正的异花授粉。
For instance, I first became aware of Patrick Radden Keefe’s storytelling abilities in his long-form features for The New Yorker , and then found his podcast Wind of Change (which is amazingly good).
例如，我第一次意识到帕特里克·拉登·基夫（Patrick Radden Keefe）的讲故事能力是在他为《纽约客》撰写的长篇专题中，然后发现了他的播客《Wind of Change》（非常棒）。
This led to me buying his printed books.
这导致我购买了他的印刷书籍。
But, I can easily imagine people stopping at the “read a writer online —> listen to their podcast” step.
但是，我很容易想象人们会停留在“在线阅读作家→收听他们的播客”步骤。
This would be a shame, because although language models and podcasts can do many things that books can’t, so too can physical books do things that new media cannot.
这将是一种耻辱，因为虽然语言模型和播客可以做许多书籍不能做的事情，但实体书也可以做新媒体不能做的事情。
These include:
这些包括：
Ownership: they cannot be erased arbitrarily, whereas even the most solid-seeming born-digital works can (witness the debacle around ABC removing the complete run of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight )
所有权：它们不能被任意删除，而即使是看起来最可靠的原生数字作品也可以（见证 ABC 删除 Nate Silver 的 FiveThirtyEight 的整个运行的崩溃）
A sense of spending time in the company of a set of characters within a unified narrative produced across years of effort.
一种在多年努力产生的统一叙事中与一组角色共度时光的感觉。
So what do we lose when we shift toward Q&A style responses, podcasts, and explainer videos for understanding our world and our past?
那么，当我们转向问答式回复、播客和解说视频来了解我们的世界和过去时，我们会失去什么呢？
I would pinpoint, above all, the #4 entry above.
首先，我要指出的是上面的#4 条目。
Which you could restate in this way: longform non-fiction is the product of layered, spaced attention , and it requires the same mental discipline from the reader.
你可以这样重申：长篇非小说类小说是分层、分散注意力的产物，它需要读者同样的心理训练。
Good non-fiction books take years to write and weeks to read.
好的非小说类书籍需要数年的时间来写，数周的时间来阅读。
You literally sit with them.
你真的和他们坐在一起。
They enter into your consciousness repeatedly, reaching you in different moods, different frames of mind, and over time, building up a mental structure which has an irreplaceable solidity and depth because it is requires sustained attention.
它们反复进入你的意识，以不同的心情、不同的心境到达你，随着时间的推移，建立起一个具有不可替代的坚固性和深度的心理结构，因为它需要持续的关注。
This is the reason why I love writing books.
这就是我喜欢写书的原因。
They live in the back of your head, and as you experience your conscious experience of ordinary life, you refer back to the other world that is starting to take shape there.
它们生活在你的脑后，当你体验日常生活的有意识体验时，你会回想起那个正在那里开始形成的另一个世界。
You find communion with the characters — real people, sometimes long dead — who populate the book-in-the-making.
你会发现与书中人物的交流——真实的人，有时已经去世很久了——他们是正在创作的书中的人物。
You begin to see them as fellow-travelers through reality, perhaps even as friends.
你开始将他们视为现实中的旅伴，甚至可能是朋友。
2 Over time, you discover connections and resonances that make you feel part of something bigger than yourself.
2 随着时间的推移，你会发现一些联系和共鸣，让你感觉自己是比自己更伟大的事物的一部分。
This is the experience that a good writer shares with readers.
这是一个优秀作家与读者分享的经验。
I recently had an experience that made me realize my new book project was starting to “lock in” to my subconscious in this way.
最近的一次经历让我意识到我的新书项目开始以这种方式“锁定”我的潜意识。
I woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30 AM, with a sensation of moving upward accompanied by a mental image of a Victorian deep sea diving suit and a fragmentary phrase: …up from the deep sea .
我半夜醒来，大约凌晨 2 点 30 分，有一种向上移动的感觉，脑海中浮现出一件维多利亚时代的深海潜水服的形象和一句支离破碎的短语：……从深海上来。
I could not remember the dream, but I knew it had somehow involved Alice James , the invalid sister of two of the most famous writers of her generation (William and Henry) and a brilliant but deeply troubled person in her own right.
我不记得那个梦，但我知道它以某种方式涉及爱丽丝·詹姆斯，她是她这一代最著名的两位作家（威廉和亨利）的病弱的妹妹，她本身是一个才华横溢但深受困扰的人。
One of the mysteries I have been trying to understand in my new book is what exactly Alice meant when she wrote this in her diary in the 1890s:
在我的新书中，我一直试图理解的谜团之一是爱丽丝在 1890 年代在日记中写下这句话时的确切含义：
…since the hideous summer of ‘78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.
……自从 78 年那个可怕的夏天，当我潜入深海时，黑暗的海水将我包围，我既不知道希望，也不知道平安。
I still don’t have a complete picture of who Alice was or what she meant here.
我仍然不完全了解爱丽丝是谁或者她在这里的意思。
But the fact that I’m dreaming with her, down there under the dark waters of 1878, makes me know I’m getting somewhere.
但事实上，我和她一起在 1878 年的黑暗水域中做梦，这一事实让我知道我已经取得了进展。
The current data regime means knowledge is getting packaged in ever-smaller chunks, with a great deal of the info that formerly was conveyed in books now passing through digital gatekeepers.
当前的数据制度意味着知识被打包成越来越小的块，以前在书籍中传达的大量信息现在通过数字看门人传递。
There is a place for that, and even more for novel experiments with form like Tyler Cowen’s concept of a “box” which would contain a dataset relevant to a non-fiction article or book topic, but allowing dynamic research and exploration rather than passive reading.
有一个地方可以做到这一点，甚至可以进行更多新颖的实验，其形式类似于泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）的“盒子”概念，其中包含与非小说类文章或书籍主题相关的数据集，但允许动态研究和探索，而不是被动阅读。
It’s also true that a well-done podcasts might approach the 30-40 hour range that audiobooks of serious history and biography regularly attain (while also taking years to produce) and therefore could evoke a similar sense of layered, spaced attention like I described above.
确实，一个做得好的播客可能会接近严肃历史和传记有声读物通常达到的 30-40 小时范围（同时也需要数年时间来制作），因此可以唤起类似我上面描述的分层、间隔注意力的感觉。
3
3
But I suspect that even with these changes — not all of which I dislike!
但我怀疑即使有这些变化——并非所有这些变化都是我不喜欢的！
— I will go to my grave convinced that there is something irreplaceable about the format of a physical book.
——直到我进入坟墓时，我仍坚信实体书的格式具有不可替代的东西。
As both writer and reader, nothing else gives me the same feeling of spending time with something weighty and important — dreaming with it, fighting with it, feeling yourself change along with it.
作为作家和读者，没有什么比这更能让我有同样的感觉，花时间在一些沉重而重要的事情上——与它一起梦想，与它战斗，感觉自己随之改变。
I derive real joy from that experience.
我从那次经历中获得了真正的快乐。
It’s interesting to note that when an AI system (Claude) was recently given the ability to create a physical shop of its own by Andon Labs , it began stocking a fair number of non-fiction books.
有趣的是，当 Andon Labs 最近赋予人工智能系统（克劳德）创建自己的实体商店的能力时，它开始储备相当数量的非小说类书籍。
Some are really great, like The Making of the Atomic Bomb .
有些确实很棒，比如《原子弹的制造》。
Others are not my favorites.
其他人不是我的最爱。
But it’s an interesting rejoinder to the assumption that language models are pushing their users away from physical books.
但这是对语言模型正在让用户远离实体书这一假设的有趣反驳。
Some might dismiss the Andon experiment as a gimmick, but I don’t think it is.
有些人可能会认为安灯实验只是一个噱头，但我认为并非如此。
The “vote” of AI systems in the physical world — their ability to intervene directly in things like, say, what to stock on a shelf — is fast becoming a fact of life rather than a quirky experiment.
人工智能系统在现实世界中的“投票”——它们直接干预诸如货架上的库存之类的事情的能力——正在迅速成为生活的事实，而不是一个古怪的实验。
And if a Claude model, when presented with the ability to intervene directly in the world, decides that it wants us all to read, say, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (visible here on the Andon Market shelves, at right), I consider that a positive sign.
如果克劳德模型在具有直接干预世界的能力时，决定让我们所有人阅读梅林·谢尔德雷克（Merlin Sheldrake）的《纠缠的生命》（可以在安东市场书架上看到，右图），我认为这是一个积极的信号。
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What if we are currently exiting a phase of “dumb LLMs” which regurgitate or badly summarize books, and entering one of thoughtful LLMs which recognize their social impact better and, as such, steer their users toward buying books?
如果我们目前正在退出“愚蠢的法学硕士”阶段，即反刍或糟糕地总结书籍，并进入一个深思熟虑的法学硕士阶段，更好地认识到其社会影响，从而引导用户购买书籍，该怎么办？
One can dream.
一个人可以梦想。
But of course, the other glimpse into the future we get at Andon, a darker one, is a world in which physical books have become a niche gift shop-type collectible like vinyl records.
当然，我们在 Andon 上看到的另一个未来，一个更黑暗的未来，是一个实体书已成为像黑胶唱片一样的小众礼品店类型收藏品的世界。
Scattered enthusiasts occasionally pull them out, insisting on their superiority to the current forms and styles.
分散的爱好者偶尔会把它们拿出来，坚持认为它们比当前的形式和风格优越。
For most, though, they are just part of the background detritus of the cultural past.
但对大多数人来说，它们只是过去文化背景碎片的一部分。
If you’ve read this far, you are the ideal person to have an opinion on this question.
如果您已经读到这里，那么您就是对这个问题发表意见的最佳人选。
I would love to hear what you think in the comments.
我很想听听您在评论中的想法。
It would also be very interesting to hear from a group of you about your most recent nonfiction book purchase and what motivated it.
如果能听到你们最近购买的非小说类书籍及其动机，也会很有趣。
I’ll go first: John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century , which is a far more interesting book than the title might seem to imply, and was an absolutely steal at only $6 for a used copy.
我先看约翰·布鲁尔（John Brewer）的《想象力的乐趣：十八世纪的英国文化》，这本书比书名所暗示的有趣得多，而且二手书只要 6 美元，绝对是超值之选。
And with that, I’m going log off Substack and return to reading some old books.
就这样，我要注销 Substack 并返回阅读一些旧书。
I suspect the hum obsession has something to do with LLMs “awareness” that their “physical selves” exist in data centers.
我怀疑这种嗡嗡声的痴迷与法学硕士“意识到”他们的“物理自我”存在于数据中心有关。
So if asked to write in a literary way, they will itemize the features that define good writing and hit upon the injunction to “show not tell” and to ground prose in material realities.
因此，如果被要求以文学方式写作，他们会逐项列出定义优秀写作的特征，并提出“展示而不是讲述”的禁令，并将散文置于物质现实的基础上。
So if you are a being that has no real materiality and does nothing but tell, you make do with the closest thing there is to a material reality you inhabit: the humming quiet of a data center.
因此，如果你是一个没有真正物质性的存在，除了讲述之外什么都不做，那么你就用最接近你所居住的物质现实的东西来凑合：数据中心的嗡嗡声和安静。
Which, for all I know, may also smell like ozone!
据我所知，这也可能闻起来像臭氧！
A lovely passage on this from Machiavelli: “When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the thresh-hold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered in mud and mire,and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom,I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them.” I feel the same way, Niccolò.
马基雅维利对此有一段可爱的段落：“当夜幕降临时，我回到家，进入书房；在门槛上，我脱掉沾满泥巴的日常衣服，穿上帝王和宫廷长袍；以更合适的方式穿着，我进入古代人的古老宫廷，受到他们亲切的欢迎，在那里我品尝了专属于我的食物，我为之而生；但我并不在那里。我羞于与他们交谈，询问他们行为的原因；而他们，以他们的人性，回答了我；在四个小时里，我不再感到无聊，我不再害怕贫穷，也不再因为我完全成为他们的一部分而颤抖；我也有同样的感觉，尼科洛。
That said, even the most “book-like” podcasts are quite short relative to a longer audiobook.
也就是说，即使是最“像书一样”的播客相对于较长的有声读物来说也相当短。
For instance, S-Town is around 7.5 hours.
例如，S-Town 大约需要 7.5 小时。
I’ll be interviewing Sheldrake about this very book on May 31 at UC Santa Cruz .
我将于 5 月 31 日在加州大学圣克鲁斯分校就这本书采访 Sheldrake。
I edit nonfiction books and would like to think that nonfiction books will always matter, for exactly the reasons you state.
我编辑非小说类书籍，并且认为非小说类书籍永远很重要，正是出于您所说的原因。
There's something very valuable about spending an extended amount of time in the company of a single author who has immersed themselves in their source material for long enough to pull story and argument from it.
花大量时间与一位作者在一起是非常有价值的，因为他已经沉浸在源材料中足够长的时间来从中提取故事和论点。
Podcasts can do a lot of this (and the good ones do cite their sources in the notes), but they're necessarily episodic, and while that can work well for certain narratives, I don't think podcasts are as successful at making a sustained argument.
播客可以做很多这样的事情（好的播客确实在注释中引用了它们的来源），但它们必然是片段式的，虽然这对于某些叙述很有效，但我认为播客在提出持续的论点方面并不那么成功。
The ones that come to mind as possible exceptions are journalistic rather than historical (e.g. "Nice White Parents"), and those tend toward
我想到的可能的例外是新闻性的而不是历史性的（例如“好白人父母”），并且那些倾向于
The economics of the industry are tricky, though.
不过，该行业的经济状况很棘手。
If PRK is selling so few copies in his first week, that means there are vanishingly few serious nonfiction books that can justify a six-figure advance according to whatever P&L.
如果 PRK 在第一周的销量如此之少，那就意味着几乎没有严肃的非小说类书籍可以根据任何损益表证明六位数的预付款是合理的。
And (as you know!) a six-figure advance is pretty much required for someone to write such a book, unless they have other resources (grants, ability to take a sabbatical, ability to hire childcare to write at night and on the weekends.) Ideally the romantasy stuff would subsidize the more serious books that are likely to have a longer shelf life, even if they don't sell zillions of copies out the gate, but tell that to the execs...I worry that the future of serious nonfiction is that it will be written by a small number of people lucky enough to have tenure, get the right fellowships, etc. or who have money from family or a spouse (a Venn diagram, of course, with considerable overlap.)
而且（如你所知！） 写这样一本书的人几乎需要六位数的预付款，除非他们有其他资源（补助金、休假的能力、雇用儿童保育员在晚上和周末写作的能力。）理想情况下，浪漫小说会补贴那些可能有更长保质期的更严肃的书籍，即使他们不卖掉无数的副本，但要告诉高管们……我担心未来严肃的非小说性之处在于，它将由少数幸运地获得终身教职、获得合适的奖学金等或从家庭或配偶那里获得资金的人撰写（当然，维恩图有相当大的重叠。）
The last book I read was ‘Set The Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties’, which illustrates the strengths and weakness in non-fiction books at the moment.
我读的最后一本书是《点燃夜晚：六十年代的洛杉矶》，它说明了目前非小说类书籍的优点和缺点。
I learnt a lot, and kept reading, become of the level of detail and good writing.
我学到了很多东西，并不断阅读，变得细节水平和良好的写作水平。
It will definitely be useful to others in the future who want to build on its strengths, or use it in teaching.
对于未来想要发挥其优势或在教学中使用它的其他人来说，它肯定是有用的。
But it is very long (over 700 pages in paperback), and it look me several months to psych myself up just to starting it.
但它很长（平装本有 700 多页），我花了好几个月的时间才开始写这本书。
I can’t see casual readers or students making the effort, in the current climate.
在目前的环境下，我看不到普通读者或学生做出努力。
It is striking how much shorter contemporary fiction has become, whilst history and biography have stayed at 400+ pages.
令人震惊的是，当代小说的篇幅已变得如此之短，而历史和传记却停留在 400 多页。
I’m sure we can all think of plenty of classic short non-fiction books, so there is no need for everything to be written at such length.
我相信我们都能想到很多经典的短篇非小说类书籍，所以没有必要把所有内容写得这么长。
There is also, let’s be honest, an over-supply of books in the market, with publishers commissioning yet another version of a story that has already been told several times.
老实说，市场上的书籍也供过于求，出版商委托出版了一个已经讲过好几次的故事的另一个版本。
I was stunned to see this week that there are three new books about the so-called Cambridge Spy Ring being released in the same month, adding to a small library of non-fiction, fiction and film about a tiny group of people.
本周我惊讶地发现，同月出版了三本关于所谓的剑桥间谍圈的新书，增加了一个关于一小群人的非小说类、小说和电影的小型图书馆。
This suggests that new subjects and new stories are needed.
这表明需要新的主题和新的故事。
And just a note on the declining price of second-hand books.
顺便提一下二手书价格下降的情况。
Anyone who lived through the fall and rise of vinyl records knows to hold the line!
任何经历过黑胶唱片兴衰的人都知道要坚持到底！
If you think it is has fundamental value, you are probably right.
如果您认为它具有根本价值，那么您可能是对的。
Let others come back to your view in time, and buy stocks whilst they are cheap.
让别人及时回到你的视野，趁便宜买入股票。