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Hard to say, but behavior by the "Karens" in other fictional media industries such as film, TV, and video games suggests that these Karens would prefer not to find out, even if it means paying a hefty financial penalty.
I'd say that a good start might be trying to appeal to boys by figuring out what appeals to them in literature by e.g. looking where there is a higher proportion of boys reading, such as, e.g. comic books (the actually successful ones from yesteryear) or visual novels or even light novels, and see what those have in common. I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today. A lot of the male-successful VNs and LNs seem to have a significant wish-fulfillment portion, which, to young men, would certainly require things that would make the typical standard-issue liberal feminist at least cringe, if not faint; as such, a publisher aiming to appeal to young male readers ought to at least consider, if not prioritize, making literature that specifically offends their editors.
I also suspect that nerdy scifi or tech-oriented military thrillers like the stuff by Crichton and Clancy of yesteryear could find a decent male audience, though, like all literature, it's likely far less popular in 2026 than 1996. And it seems vanishingly unlikely that someone who's not a male autist or autist-adjacent could or would want to write a good book like that; as such, if the publishers made sure not to discriminate against males and possibly even sought out autists or autist-adjacents, with bonus points if their writings seemed to condone ideologies that would make their median editor ragequit and call for a boycott of the publisher, then that might also be a good step.
Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But the claim that little Jaden with the slack jaw and glazed eyes would totally click away from his sixtieth Dhar Mann video and dive into thick books if only the mean editor ladies... what, put more vapid big-titty schoolgirls in there? I think you're going to need a proposed mechanism for that. The internet is already chockablock with vapid big-titty schoolgirls, many of whom you can apparently watch getting excitingly choked and butt-fucked while their big titties bounce around in crystal-clear high-def. What's the competing attraction of a paragraph of tepid prose description that forces you to exhaustingly imagine the titties yourself based on a lot of words whose meanings you don't know?
As you pointed out, there's lots of media out there that's already consumed enthusiastically by boys and men. Versus traditional prose novels, all of those other media genres are notable for dispensing much higher levels of stimulation while making much lighter demands on abstract thinking, verbal reasoning, long-term focus and complex emotional processing. If a group, left to itself, preferentially consumes media that's mostly pictures with few words, media that features fast-moving objects, physical conflicts, bright colors and flashing lights, media with cartoonish characters based on familiar TV/film/game IP and predictable wish-fulfillment plots, media with exaggerated visual depictions of receptive sexual targets, then that's what I'd call an extremely obvious revealed preference for not prose literary fiction. Which is fine, but again, what's your model for "just mix in a little cartoony comic-book fanservice porn and maybe they'll rush back to novels"? Why would they be likelier to take the medicine with a spoonful of sugar, when they can already just eat the sugar straight?
Things work in tendencies and on the margins. I thought that would be common sense for anyone here. If literature is marginally more entertaining to young males than they are now, then the boys for whom not-books was one epsilon more entertaining than books will shift over, this causing a higher proportion of boys to read. This is baseline for how ALL population-wide phenomena of personal choices works.
The fact that there are boys right now who read for fun and balance reading and video games for fun is about as strong proof as possible that there are boys on these margins. Resorting to some argument from personal incredulity of some version of "X can't POSSIBLY be made to tear kids away from Y due to A, B, C" when we currently see current versions of X doing just that - just to a lesser extent than would be equal - is a way of conceding the argument entirely.
You make no point here, though. The point is that when you see a metal object with a flat head and a pointy end in a box that says "nails" on it, then you can most likely accurately call it a nail. The ideology in question has overtly taken over literature and other fictional media with the explicit intention of appealing more to females and less to males. Maybe they're so incompetent that all their efforts have no effect, but certainly just turning off their explicit pushing-away-males strategy is something one ought to consider when thinking about how to attract males.
More generally, if someone is failing to accomplish something, then the possibility of burning down whatever ideology got them there has to be considered a reasonable possibility. That this isn't one of the first thoughts to occur indicates a lack of desire to accomplish this. Which is also fine, but it's important to be clear that it's entirely due to a lack of desire, not due to a lack of ability (the ability might be lacking, but anyone who claims that we have meaningful evidence that it is is someone who hasn't been paying attention the last 20 years).
Some things do work by tendencies and on the margins, yes. Superstimuli and vices do not - or at least, not in that direction, and not at a scale that drives meaningful change.
Generations of do-gooders have thought as you do, and it always ends up in Ned-Flanders cringe. For instance, compare:
Oh no, since we installed the free Pop Tart machine, kids are eating nothing but Pop Tarts instead of their apples and broccoli! So I guess we should serve frosting-coated apples and broccoli, then a few kids will eat those on the margin.
Oh no, since we eliminated scheduled start times, everybody's sleeping in instead of going to work! So I guess we should dim the lights and get soft pillows for our chairs, then maybe on the margin people will choose to come to work.
Oh no, ever since our church community dissolved, kids are going to the club instead of coming to service! So I guess we should get a drum kit to jazz up our hymns a little bit, then on the margin the delinquents will come here."
Or, for that matter, consider every tubby middle-aged person who's ever bought a little second TV to put above the dusty home rowing machine, hoping that on the margin it'll make them choose exercise during evening Netflix.
Not how it works.
Right, and I am saying that just like the tankie's totalizing hatred of "capitalism" (by which he means partly that one asshole boss he hated, partly a media caricature of fat-cat cigar-chomping Gilded Age CEOs), the similarly vague tribalist loathing of "feminism" (=Twitter Karen memes plus that one insufferable lady in HR) is leading people to get the causal arrows very obviously twisted here.
To use another analogy: if CEO income has increased, and also homelessness has also increased around company headquarters, and both of those things make you sad and annoyed, that still does not mean that "capitalism" is the ideology that "got us there," or that CEO delenda est would restore any meaningful number of homeless guys to happy productive lives in tidy little cottages of their own.
But when the "Karens" are explicitly, overtly saying that they're going into these industries specifically to make them appeal relatively more to females (definitionally appeal relatively less to males), then the causal arrow is very obviously consistent with what I'm claiming.
Furthermore, when we're dealing with an ideology that is specifically unpopular among the demographic we're talking about - i.e. feminism doesn't have a good reputation among young men, relatively - it makes perfect sense that if one had the intent of appealing to that demographic more, then reducing the presence of the totalizing ideology that has taken over the industry is a pretty obvious simple step that's at least worth considering, if not actually trying out.
If capitalism was an ideology whose principles and whose strongest, most influential proponents were explicitly, overtly calling for increasing CEO income at the cost of increasing homelessness, you might have a point. But it isn't. The actual specifics of these concepts matter; you can't just swap some labels around an argument, show that that version doesn't make sense, and claim that that demonstrates that the original doesn't.
Furthermore, if someone had a plausible argument for why capitalism necessarily results in more CEO income at the cost of more homelessness, then it would absolutely be incumbent on anyone who wanted to reduce homelessness (or lower CEO income or both) to consider burning capitalism to the ground as one of the steps in a potential solution. Otherwise, they would be obviously an ideologue who prioritizes ideological commitments over actual meaningful goals and thus has no credibility in judging possible solutions.
EDIT: As for that superstimuli and vices business, if you're claiming that such things have some quality about them that makes them immune to margins and trends, and that modern video games fit into that, those are a couple of extraordinary claims. We live in a world where, right now, millions, possibly billions, of people are balancing superstimuli and vices like video games, gambling, heroin, meth, porn, cheesecake, etc. with their everyday responsibilities and also other non-superstimuli entertainment (e.g. chatting with a friend, going to a park, watching a baseball game) in a functional way, despite having near-trivial access to these superstimuli/vices at their fingertips. This points to the idea that superstimuli and vices are things that vast swathes of the population are capable of managing in their everyday lives, such that they're not purely slaves to it, i.e. they can modulate their use of it based on the potential consequences. If they can modulate it, then there will be a marginal effect from affecting their positive/negative qualities relative to alternatives.
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