Oh yeah, the market’s dead. And what were the popular works before it died? Doorstop literary novels? Ovid in the original Latin? Nah, thin, trashy sci fi books

Oh yeah, the market’s dead. And what were the popular works before it died? Doorstop literary novels? Ovid in the original Latin? Nah, thin, trashy sci fi books and detective novels. Itty bitty black-hat-white-hat westerns. Plus romance, as ever. Home video media took most of that market, by being a superior replacement for most of what people were buying and reading, for the purposes they were buying and reading it. Smartphones put the last nail in the coffin. Romance remains, and the rest of popular fiction can’t afford to limit its market if the publisher hopes to make money. You need to appeal to a lot of the remaining market, to make money, these days. These shifts in what gets published haven’t happened for no reason, they’re market-driven. [edit] and, to head it off—I’ve evidently not done a good enough job of naming all the things I’m not claiming, in this thread, simply not-claiming them apparently being insufficient—no, I’m not especially worried about some crisis of literacy or moral or intellectual decline because of this. My whole point is that reading as an activity isn’t necessarily special or worthy of reverence. Replacing Zane Grey with Bonanza reruns is simply not an indicator of… anything important, really. Hell, even if film and TV are drawing, say, Woolf readers away from their books—what of it? It’s not as if there aren’t some sublime-as-hell, amazing films out there waiting for literature nerds to deep-read the shit out of them. That’s fine too! Reading. Is. Not. Special. Not inherently. And it doesn’t need to be. It can just be reading.