Today’s Youth and Reading
Excerpt from the unpublished book Lenses.
There’s a plus as well as a minus to the reading habits of the young today. Tim, my youngest, has for more than ten years been into fan fiction. Those are stories written by ordinary fans based on well-known stories and characters from TV, movies, and videogames. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fanfics that you can read for free on the Internet. Many are book length. The authors have no intention of ever being paid for this work. They write for the social-sharing high of finding an appreciative audience, no matter how small.
For about half a dozen years, Tim, while in junior high and high school, read such stories — the bad as well as the good, for long hours. He’s a fast reader — polishing off a typical Harry Potter book in less than a day. He would email the authors with comments and suggestions for improvements; and, for the best fanfics, he would ask permission to post the stories at his own site, and then would work with the authors to make copy-editing improvements.
Meanwhile, with the rise of eBooks, far more books are being written and published than ever before, though many of them get very few readers, if any at all. It costs nothing to publish an eBook in the Amazon Kindle store. There are millions of books available there, and I believe that the vast majority of those have probably been written and published in the last five years.
In other words, a lot more people are writing and reading than ever before. Many who read online for several hours every day have never read and never heard of the greatest books that were ever written. But when such people acquire a taste for the classics, they can get immediate access to them at very little cost.
As a publisher of public domain classic eBooks, my bestseller list might surprise you — Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 20-volume Babylonian Talmud, the complete works of Mark Twain, each selling for just 99 cents.
I’ve been amazed at how closely some of the fans of classic books read. I got dozens of complaints that my edition of Gibbon didn’t include the Greek spelling of Greek words in the footnotes. And I got a complaint that my edition of Jane Eyre was missing one word in the penultimate chapter. Spellcheck can’t detect what’s missing, nor could any proofreader. Some of my most loyal customers are blind and use technology to convert the text to voice. (One of those is a spelunker, exploring caves on her weekends…)
I see no reason to despair. Quite the contrary.
The cultural climate is chaotic. Schools no longer drill the Western canon into students, as Harold Bloom decries in his book of that title. That makes it difficult to build on and to pass on to future generations a rich literary context for allusion and enjoyment and understanding. But, thanks to the Internet, I see broad-based enthusiasm for story such as the world has never seen before.
Good things are happening and will happen. The glass is seven-eighths full. Rejoice! Write those novels and poems that have been festering in the back of your mind. Pull the unfinished ones out of dusty drawers and finish them. Don’t worry about convincing traditional publishers to publish them. Publish them as eBooks or post them on a website of your own. Or go to Kindle or to PublishDrive and offer them as eBooks. Encourage friends and colleagues to read and spread the word. You won’t get rich, but you might find a few good readers. And what more could any writer ever hope for?
