Interesting write-up, hadn't heard of The Trial.

This confirms a few things I suspected, mainly, even the big names hardly earn out their advances, and trad pub wants to spend as little on marketing as possible. The second point is why it never interested me. If I have to do all of the work of building up the audience to begin with, what do I need trad pub for?

The rest of the doom and gloom ... I think we could have expected.

So many interesting tidbits copied into that article. Thanks for sharing, it's worth the read.

I haven't published traditionally, but from what I recall, publishers expected authors to do most of their own marketing.  And authors had to pay out of their own pocket (or advance) for most, if not all, of that.  That would be stuff like traveling to book signings, radio/TV promos/interviews where possible and whatever other means of marketing the author may do.

Even just a few years ago, self-publishing had a stigma despite the number of authors who had historically self-published.  There is no as much of a stigma against self-publishing anymore.  And, more and more people are opting for eBooks and self-published eBooks are pretty much identical to eBooks from big publishing companies.

So, I wonder if the big publishers have effectively experienced a "brain drain" where those authors that were successful at marketing their books just sort of cut out the middleman and newer authors just skipped the middleman entirely, both due to the ease of self-publishing these days and the growing loss of stigma around it.

Which would mean not that people aren't buying books but that people aren't buying very many books from the big publishers.

I most often read on a sepia background with a contrasting font color. The built-in choice for font against the sepia isn't often dark enough, but the sepia background is a lot easier to read for long stretches at a time for me. So I read in apps that give me a choice of colors so I can find one that works best. I'm always looking for the least glare because I read so much and I do it for long stretches at a time.

But that can depend on lighting in the area too. Sometimes I do switch to a white background, and sometimes I switch to a black one if the room light is very dim.

For paper, I love the way white looks. But reading from it does seem to make my eyes tired faster. And reading outdoors on a sunny day is blinding if the paper is white. Since cream has been the traditional color expectation for fiction, I've stuck with it in my print books and will probably keep doing it.

But eyes are different. I don't think there's enough of a reason to choose one over the other. And I wouldn't think it weird if I saw a hardcover book with white paper. The paper colors of most paperbacks vary wildly even within the cream family. Who is to say it isn't just a really, really pale cream? :D

If I'm remembering correctly, the last time I got a good look at a large print book, other than having really thin paper, it was also bright, crisp white. So that could be the standard for helping the most people see clearly. I don't know.

I know this is getting off-topic, but here are some large print guidelines I found from The American Printing House for the Blind:
https://www.aph.org/resources/large-print-guidelines/

Paper

Paper that is white with black text is considered the best for contrast.
However, many people who have low vision have difficulty with white
paper because it produces glare in some cases. Other options are ivory,
antique white, eggshell, light beige, pastel yellow, or pastel pink paper
with black text. Other good combinations are light beige paper with navy
text, yellow paper with navy text, eggshell paper with dark brown text.
Gray paper is not recommended under any circumstances. Neither is gray
text. This is true for both print and electronic text.

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
No one buys books
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

---Discusses the celebrity and beststeller-driven Big 5 and also mentions indy authors:

If publishing houses make minimal investment in marketing their authors and focus largely on celebrity books and their backlist, authors who can’t snag a large advance might have better luck building their own audience and publishing elsewhere.

The romance category has already gone independent.

Many of those heavy readers of romance novels at that time switched to self-published stories. A very different price point. 99 cents, $1.99, away from what we call mass-market trade paperbacks… The mass-market trade paperback is the sort of small-format mass-market book, like it is a trade paperback, but a smaller format. It has been declining for the last 25 years. But we had a step change around ’14, ‘15, with this trend that so many consumers went away from mass-market books into electronic ebooks in particular and self-published books.”

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

That made me want to see if the contrast is actually as good as it seems. I came across this, which was interesting reading.

https://veroniiiica.com/paper-colors-and-low-vision/

That's interesting. There are sites where you can check the different color combinations to see how well they meet accessibility guidelines. The greater the contrast, the more likely a combination is to pass. Think black print on a very light color or white print on a very dark color. Those pass. Anything much closer together than that fails. That's a little different from the advice given in the linked article. But perhaps the sites aren't considering the glare factor.

I just checked the options users can select on my website. Selected high contrast makes all the backgrounds black and default text white. Negative contrast still has a black background but makes all non-default text (like differently colored links) yellow. Light background setting makes all backgrounds white and all text black (which does indeed look a little too bright to me). Without any of those adjustments, most sections of the site pass anyway, but I'm still looking for a way to get the default text to be black instead of dark gray. Of course, there are also some monitor adjustments that will help.

Computer monitors in general are too bright for extended work. But I find even just wearing blue blockers (which deflect the part that's supposed to be bad for your retinas) helps me work longer without noticing the glare.

As Post-Crisis D points out, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, mostly because different vision problems may require different solutions.

I just checked the kindle app, which allows for three different backgrounds: white, black, and sepia.