Self-storage facilities in the US

Self-published books and self-storage facilities have grown together across America from 2010 to 2023, leading some to speculate that every unsold box of self-published memoirs ultimately finds its way into a 10-by-10 climate-controlled unit in a suburb outside Columbus. The number of self-published titles has exploded from a few hundred thousand annually to over a million, and Americans are also storing more stuff than ever. There may be a unified theory here. It probably involves Amazon.

Both self-publishing and self-storage represent the democratization of infrastructure that was once gatekept by institutions — publishers and real estate developers, respectively. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, launched in 2007, drove self-publishing volumes from roughly 133,000 titles in 2010 to over one million annually by the early 2020s. Self-storage facility counts grew in parallel as suburban sprawl and consumer accumulation continued, with the industry revenue exceeding $39 billion by the early 2020s. Both are manifestations of the same platform-economy and individual-empowerment cultural moment.

When gatekeepers fall, volumes rise — in publishing, in storage, and in the production of spurious correlations. Abundance in one domain rarely causes abundance in another, but they often arrive together on the same cultural tide.