A Brief History Of Jewish Books - What Sells Today? - A New Book - Buy It

It is really hard to sell a sefer these days. In Europe there were some Jewish towns in which there was barely a complete Shas. Back then the concept "rare sefer" applied to every sefer, except maybe a siddur and chumash. Today, Baruch Hashem, we are innundated with more and more sefarim. Every year, hundreds and hundreds of new sfarim come out and due to our relative affluence, we can easily purchase many of them.

I heard that one book seller said, that today, if you want to sell a book, it has to be "Soloveitchik, pictures or stories". Serious scholarship is just not popular [enough] in this generation. I BS"D have loads of material in my computer but refrain from publishing because it costs a ton and there is a very limited market [after my mother, of course] for long, complex talmudic discourses. Those who are interested, learn the classics and not contemporary works. It makes sense. Why learn what a 25 year old budding scholar wrote when at the same time you can be learning what Rabban Shel Kol Yisrael, Rebbi Akiva Eiger wrote...?

One of the HIT sefarim of our generation which made it's way into almost every Beis Medrash is the "Piskei Tshuvos" of Rav Simcha Ben Tzion Rabinovitch. It is based on the Shulchan Aruch and in a concise [people like concise - the twitter generation...] and easy to read format, he presents the rulings of modern day poskim on the many contemporary halachic issues which didn't exist on the time of the Shulchan Aruch. He has already produced a sefer on five out of the six volumes of Mishna Brura Orach Chaim [excluding the laws of Eiruvin]. Now he is redoing Hilchos Shabbos in a more expanded form. He just came out with his second volume on Hilchos Shabbos and I highly recommend it.

It is truly שוה לכל נפש - a sefer appropriate for the masses [in this volume he even has a word list in the back where all of the difficult Hebrew words are translated into English. STRANGELY, it is translated into English using Hebrew characters]. So all of those who care about expanding there knowledge of halacha - this is the sefer to purchase.

In summation: Recommended!:-).