There is a big difference between paperbacks and TikTokification:

Paperbacks required authors to spend the same amount of time/effort to create content with a vastly expanded market and distribution mechanism.

TikTok and Insta created N creators to M consumers where N is nearly the same as M. Making the distribution channels bigger but effortless to create content doesn’t magically equate quality paperbacks with short form hummingbird-attention videos.

Not sure about your N = M

TikTok isn’t much bigger than open mics?

This is… not even remotely true or even descriptive of the nature of TikTok.