Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

Not sure it's worth engaging with such toxic commentary regardless of political affiliation.

Part of this is because a lot of popular non-fiction (i.e. non-academic) comes from long form journalism. Personally, I like that style but understand that some people don't. The focus on that style is not pure information --- the authors aren't writing a textbook or a self-help book --- the authors are telling a story. I could read the wiki page on the Wright Bros, but I read David McCullough's "The Wright Brothers" because the writing is graceful and elegant and the storytelling is vivid and captivating.

The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the self-help/business books that aspire to long form journalism but are probably better off left as a bullet list on a blogpost. These ones are also infected by the idea that everyone of their bullet points needs a vague connection to some elaborate neuroscientific explanation and a "case study" that is usually some oversimplification. Cal Newport is painfully guilty of this, for an example; but it's everywhere in the self-help genre and especially in "airport" books. (I actually think Newport is a better blogger and occasional NewYorker writer than a book writer. His "insights" aren't that grand.)

Fiction, well, I think a long work of fiction is fine as long as the story can handle it. My tastes tend toward florid, "purple", and quite dense prose and descriptions. I like when an author "paints a scene". On the other hand, I find the recent trend of extremely "to the point", stripped down "minimalist" writing that is very common in a lot of contemporary literature (Rooney, for example) and fantasy writing (Sanderson, for example) to be downright boring and comes off as half-baked. There are probably too many 500+pg books because of publishers though. Fantasy has its own obsession with "epics". 200-250pgs is actually a great goldilocks zone that doesn't get published so often nowadays, but should make a comeback. The big publishers hate them though.

    These are... not books.
    you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions

I sort of see what you're saying, even if I don't agree with it. I think the really neat thing about these, are that they present _classic stories_ in a way that is more appealing, and more easily digestible, to kids who might never have considered them otherwise.

I remember when I was in middle school, my English teacher had a box in the corner of comic book adaptations of about a dozen "classic" stories. Several were stories by Poe, and similar 1800s-era classics. (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, etc.) I devoured them (despite loving reading "regular" books too). I've forgotten most of the plots, but remember having enjoyed reading them. Some of them, I've never read the originals, but for others I had already read (or subsequently read) the more-detailed originals. (Anything Sherlock Holmes, at the time, was something I enjoyed.)

Reading these stories as a manga makes you lose out on a lot of details, but probably makes it a lot easier to digest some things. Pride and Prejudice, for example, has pages of details of peoples' social lives, and the complex interactions of several younger and older women, along with descriptions of gardens and houses, and I know that I definitely had trouble keeping track of who all the ancillary characters were. Having visual representations of these characters might make it easier to track that. You lose out on the richness of Austen's prose, but you keep the core character developments, relationships, and emotional interactions that form the basis of the stories.

Anime is an extremely lucrative market, and Westerners spend an absurd amount of money on it, with Hollywood missing out. It's not because it's Japanese, or its weirder quirks, it's just because Japan is making it and Hollywood isn't, because Hollywood is institutionally incapable of believing people want (a) weird fantasy (b) that takes itself seriously (c) in quantity over quality, or even that adult media can be animated in the first place.

I really don't think it's that hard to imagine the same is true of manga vs books. The manga section at any serious bookstore is the size of 3-4 other sections put together, and it isn't for no reason. Even if you assume it's a graphic-novel-specific preference, for every one Western hit like Bone, there's fifty more equally massive hits out of Japan, because they simply try more often. Authors making weird stuff in the West are unable to enter traditional publishing (with the industry learning the exact wrong thing from the YA phenomenon) and frequently settle for a web serial + Patreon model, whereas if they were in Japan there's a well established light novel to manga to anime to movie pipeline.

There is something really funny about reading a book about instant gratification and the ways modern technology has altered our demands for it, and then criticizing that book for not getting to the point quick enough.

I do agree that 90% of self-help books are better left as blog posts, though. To be honest, all of these "how to fix your attention span" books have been repeating the same thing for nearly 2 decades now. They don't really say anything new about how to do it; they package the same repeated things in new packaging.