The article claims: > English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19

The article claims: > English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. Nothing new here, surely? I'd hazard a guess a huge majority of people, throughout eternity, will never read 19th and 20th century literature, myself included. Unless we come up with some way of uploading books directly to our conscious awareness or whatever. Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, and as of June 23rd 2018 contains over 57,000 books. If we ignore for a minute all of the online book stores where one can go to buy books, and how well some of those stores are doing, then Project Gutenberg alone has probably done more for reading than we may have lost due to swipe-and-skim reading. How many of us have bought and pirated more eBooks than we've read paper books. I work with tradesmen. I've asked so many of them "read any good books lately?" and they typically reply with something like "books? fuck off, I'm not gay". Seriously. But even the majority of these people, especially those under about 35 years old, are, in their spare time, reading constantly. Okay, so they're skim reading non-sense on Pinstabookwittertube, or whatever the kids are into this five-minute-period. I can't keep up, must be getting old, get off my lawn, etc. etc. I'd say that's still a huge improvement over the nothing similar cohorts were reading a decade a go. I'm still convinced some of the older guys can barely read well enough to get through their every day lives. And, generally speaking, I'm skeptical of most 'The Sky Is Falling: Younger People Are Worse at X (And Y and Z and A and B ...' positions, for all the obvious reasons.