Unpopular opinion: coffee table books should have real stories, not just pretty photos

I picked up a new cat book at a shop in Portland last month, paid $45 for it, and every single page was just a close-up of a tabby staring at something. There was no text, no history, no funny captions. My favorite book from 2018 had little blurbs about each rescue cat's personality, like the one who stole socks or the blind Maine Coon. That is what makes a coffee table book worth leaving out for guests to browse. Has anyone else noticed publishers are skipping the writing part entirely these days?

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the_jake19d ago

Forty five bucks for zero words? That is wild. My local bookstore has a whole shelf of those giant photo books and I started flipping through them last week, they all feel like someone just dumped a camera roll into a printer. I still remember the 2018 rescue cat one because it told you which litter box was destroyed in the making of that photo. Publishers are treating us like we can't read or something, it's a book not a poster.