The claim of the title turns out to be significantly narrower when you get into the text. Still, it offers some good points. The following is perhaps what’s most relevant to Hacker News.

> In this, as Elle has pointed out before, the economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.