Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy.  That&#x27;s practically the definition of academic writing.  They go into incredible amount of depths for a very, very niche audience: other academics interested in, e.g., the experience of women in Japanese detective novels of the 19th century.  (n.b. Actually a book, assuming I am remembering all the details correctly.  An advisor spent years on it.)<p>This is <i>exactly</i> the result the market should hope for: a profitable method which gets academics to write down very-incredibly-niche ideas and then put copies of them exactly where someone would expect to find very-incredibly-niche ideas.  The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books.  It is &quot;no book.&quot;  They do not meaningfully trade off with equally-in-depth blog posts, because academics are not scored on, and hence do not as a matter of practice actually sit down and write, book-length blog posts.