“I don’t read business books,” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, a business book that spent 36 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. “And I almost never talk to anyone who reads them.” He isn’t alone in his disdain. “I usually tell people not to read business books at all,” says Bob MacDonald, who’s written several popular business titles such as Cheat to Win and Beat the System. “They’re just ego trips. You’re not going to learn anything.”
Regardless, publishers keep cranking out as many as 11,000 new business books each year, according to the co-authors of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, which doesn’t account for the untold number of self-published e-books. Publishers don’t seem to have any idea what works. The strategy, if it can be called that, is to flood the market and hope a book floats to the surface. So for every Tipping Point or Freakonomics, there are remainder bins filled with titles such as Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
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