Everybody Buys Self Help Books and Nobody Reads Them

According to a survey by WeBuyBooks - a company which buys people’s unwanted books - the most offered genre, i.e. offered from those people selling books to WeBuyBooks - is self help. They account for a full 30 per cent of those books, and from the condition they are returned in, most have been barely read, even unopened.

I can come up with a number of theories to explain this phenomenon. Probably the least likely is that most of them are rubbish. Most of them are rubbish, but that never stopped self help books getting to the top of the best seller lists. I mean, have you read ‘The Secret’? Well, neither have I, but I’m pretty certain it’s a load of junk and it’s sold millions.

I should say at this point, contrary to appearances that on the whole I approve of self help books - the good ones at least, which constitute a fairly small percentage. My recent favourite is ‘The Antidote : Happiness for People Who Can¿t Stand Positive Thinking’ by Oliver Burkeman and ‘The Way of Freedom’ by Salvadore Poe but there are other, older great self help books, among them ‘The Meaning of Happiness’ by Alan Watts and ‘Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison’ by Dorothy Rowe. There are many more - so I am not a self help book sceptic, more a self help book gourmet who deplores all the junk food out there, a menu which amounts to a kind of hyper Macdonald’s of philosophy and therapy.