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Notes -
Book publishers specifically, no, it's not something I follow. But this seems the be a trend with other products that have previously considered what boys and young men like: movies, comic books, and video games. Beer... They will happily alienate their male audience if they believe it will be a political liability.
Women control the majority of consumer spending. Punching down at boys and men is just good business.
It's funny reading this thread and other arguments about this topic on social media, where apparently it can't possibly be the case that young men have been told to get the fuck away from books and are doing as they're told, nobody would ever put their finger on the scale it can only possibly be the golden free market acting completely independently of any social pressure!
And then looking at video games 'where all the young men have gone because video games are male and books are female' and every big developer is jamming DEI shit into everything as hard and fast as they can because the media incessantly accuses them of excluding women. Even call of duty puts a woman in its steam title card thing to attract women, but if boys and men aren't reading books then they must have just suddenly started hating reading for no reason! Oh well, they can play video games instead... For now.
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I don't think it's as actively-malicious as you imply, though. I think a lot of it is just pandering, combined with defensive doubling-down when called out on it.
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