The cashier at the Union Square Barnes and Nobles told me that the essays books were on the 4th floor, but I didn't imagine how sparse the selection would be. I found 2 cases, 10 shelves total, something like 60 linear feat of essay book spines. I wondered if the 4th floor was a microcosm, and so I acted on my urge to count shelves to know precisely how inferior essays are.

I counted 82 outer units (7 shelves high), 236 inner units (5 high), and 56 displays (which I count as a shelf). That's 2 miles of books on the 4th floor (spines out, 10,860 linear feet +/- 5%).

Essays make up .005% of the fourth floor, or 1 in 200. For context, the floor was 33% fiction, and even 8% "manga" (Japanese comics). 12% of the floor was about war & crime; a sub-war section titled "World War I" is about the same size as the entire essay collection. It doesn't come close to World War II (this says something about our priorities).

There are probably all sorts of reasons why books of essays are so unpopular: 1) essay is a dirty word that reminds people of high school. 2) essays make more sense on the Internet, and 3) a book is prestigious and better for marketing. We have a book fetish. If you’re a writer, don’t you write books?

Yet, the critique on books I can't stop hearing is "that should be an essay." It’s funny that books are “dying,” most of them should be essays anyway, but essays as a category are basically neglected.

I think we’re positioned for the era of the essay.

You can read them in one sitting. Books are beyond our culture’s attention span, and tweets are too shallow and overwhelming.
Essays are the most flexible medium; it’s the sole genre that can incorporate the best moves of other genres (memoir, journalism, academia, poetry, fiction, etc.)
While 99% of people will never write a book, anyone can write and publish essays online. It’s more demotic. You can imagine a 2-way essay market (where readers and writers are equal). This is basically Substack.

How to write a smart internet essay

a matryoshka of possibilities