US librarians employed

It is a curious fact, and one which most people find it rather hard to believe, that the more Americans decided to publish their own books—roughly doubling from 375,000 in 2010 to 2.3 million by 2021—the fewer librarians the country seemed to require, as if the universe had determined that one person's ability to get their memoir into print was inversely proportional to another person's continued employment organizing it. One might almost think the data was personally offended by librarians.

What we're probably watching here is the collision of two economic trends moving in opposite directions. Library budgets have been squeezed in those years by municipal austerity and reduced circulation numbers as people shifted to ebooks and streaming; simultaneously, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and a dozen other platforms made it technically free to upload a novel at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. By 2021, a single author could do what once required a house of 40 people—and did, roughly 2.3 million times that year, while library staff positions fell from about 148,000 to 130,000. The real driver isn't revenge, it's infrastructure: the same digital revolution that democratized publishing decimated the institutions built on the old model.

This is what it looks like when the future and the past pass each other on the stairs without saying hello. One is ascending, one descending, and neither is particularly interested in conversation. We spot a pattern and call it a story when really it's just two separate economies saying goodbye. The data doesn't care which one we miss more.