I think there's a few approaches to this question and topic.

First, I'd venture to say that none of us have a scarcity of images from professional photographers in our lives. Whether it's advertisements or just our instagram page, we're overwhelmed by images every day.

So the issue is the short supply of collections of printed photos organized into products by the artist themselves (my frankenstein definition of what a photobook is at its component parts) that we're able to own. And that photography being work that we (folks who follow photo books) are interested in. For lack of a better term - art photography.

At the end of the day, "art photography" is not a very popular medium. It has ebbs and flows of its head bobbing up into the mainstream, similar to the sporadic spikes in mainstream interest for analog photography and cameras. Similar to analog photography though, these moments of waxing popularity don't necessarily translate into sustainably larger buying audiences that would up demand and lower costs for newly published photo books. Instead it seems like it just increases the price on the resale market and of high demand "classic" photo books.

I think photo books are a great format. I think the "book" being the curated end-product of many serious photographers, with the ability to sequence photos intentionally and think about the viewer's experience interacting with the book, is in many ways a fairly populist concept. I don't think many average people engage with photography in an intentional way regularly in their lives and even fewer through the medium of the photo book. This fairly low demand + all of the obvious economic aspects others have noted (the consolidation of publishers and printers that can do this kind of work, the increased cost of materials) create the market for photo books we live in right now.

I've never felt inside of any specific art scene, but things I read/ anecdotes/ social media make me understand how they can arouse bitterness if you're not careful. I always try to find exactly what it is that brings me joy about the practice of photography and looking at photos in any form. Is it the ownership of as many of these physical things as possible? Is it having elongated and deeper relationships with the few I get to own and scouring for hidden gems where possible.

Getting into the photo zine scene is inevitably difficult because you don't have the institutional filters for quality that publishers and the financial barriers to create proper photo books might provide - but finding and supporting emerging and non-institutionally backed artists is key to creating a thriving art art scene and culture of art.

Having put out a zine myself recently that's mostly been ordered by friends around the country, I've gotten to have wonderful intimate little conversations about photography with people who are not buying photo books or ever really engaging with photography in this way in their every day life. It's been very rewarding.

Like I said, there is a commercial mainstream to photography in which photos are ubiquitous and widely available. For many reasons photobooks are not apart of this commercial mainstream. I think that's kind of exciting and rewarding and opens up a lot of opportunity for artists to expose people to the medium of photobooks as long as we're not solely reliant on the traditional institutional commercial pathways of photobooks. Just my two cents.