Right now, novels appear to be the safest market – the market isn’t large, but most consumers pay for them. Non-fiction books have to compete with Wikipedia and the rest of the web, while people have less and less time to get deep into a topic. Besides, many non-fiction books seem to either be collections of magazine articles (eg: Malcolm Gladwell), or single magazine articles stretched to book-length with the addition of anecdotes (eg: Urban Tribes).

Jakob Nielsen believes that eBook readers will invert that as the Kindle is very usable for linear, engrossing content but unusable for most non-fiction. He also believes that non-fiction still has a market: The ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites, which are better for quick hits and controversial writing.

But Clay Shirky (an Internet fanboy whose ideas must be taken with a grain of salt) argues convincingly that all the writers are going to go broke before we invent a new way to pay them:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it.