Things I've learned from chatting with patrons at my library: The formulas for popular books continue in print because they are popular- they sell. In the self-help realm, that often means whole chapters of other people and their feel-good story of success. Some of the people who read self-help books want the promise that this one book will be the one to fix their problem and the peoples stories offered in the book support that idea. A few readers just want the positive stories (these stories are, at core, mini novels of problems resolved) and don't really care about the self-help part.

The belief of 'if I do what this book says, my life will be better' is real. Could that be translated to another format? Maybe? I can see it working as an App, maybe as a YT channel with the right formatting. Humans are odd in that, while we want the fast and easy answer, if the answer looks too easy we won't believe it works- and because we don't believe it we won't act upon/do it and it thus, it won't work (completely ignoring that it didn't work because we didn't do the work).

So i've only read 2 - Dale Carnegies famous one and the power of habit. Was easily able to finish the first bc it was thankfully pretty short (the way it should be done frankly) but put down the 2nd about halfway. The meat of both books were basically case studies that served different examples for different situations (Habit just had a million of these cases and it got repetitive)

With those in mind I do disagree with this take. IMO the problem with simply reading a summary or bullet point list is that the concepts will likely remain as theory in your mind. The point of all the case studies is seeing how these concepts manifest in a variety of real life examples and how a person can effectively apply them. I'd say the same rule applies to non fiction/educational books. You can list out their facts but they're probably not going to sink in for you. People spend time learning case studies in law school, b-school, etc for a reason bc theory is different from application. But with that said you don't need millions of these examples and I'm wary that this is what most of them do so I haven't touched one since lol (I do recommend the carnegie one bc I feel like many would benefit it and it's easy to get through. Despite the misleading title & sales pitch, it's really just a book about how to listen to other people and how listening is a commonly underdeveloped skil. Habit was good but I wouldn't spend money on it considering how much of it wasnt needed)