Best time ever to be a reader

As Mr. Pinter lists his reasons for this being the best of times, I would like to include a few more that he has not yet enumerated.

For one thing, there is a great paradoxical occurrence. We are seeing the large corporate behemoths, like Amazon and Murdoch, being taken down a peg or two over some of their corporate decisions. They are not being taken down by others trying to gobble them up but by consumers who are rather tired of being taken for granted.

But even more to my liking in this huge new discussion is the fact that they are being called on the carpet, so to speak, by little people like me. I run the Itinerant Book Show and when I tour, I am able to talk to people in small towns along my route who are interested in books, book buying, becoming writers, etc. They are aware of how quickly the whole business model is changing and for the better and they are also aware that now is the time to jump in and make their voices heard.

I go back on the road again in April. (Driving through major snowstorms is not a good part of the job description, so I got rid of it.) I shall be in Clarion, Pa and in Oberlin and Toledo, OH and in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I will be back with some old friends and making some new ones.

We will all talk about books and why we love them and why we buy them. I will be selling a car load of them, by me but more importantly by a large number of wonderful authors whose books you may not be able to buy in any other way.

So, yes, there are plenty of ways to buy books. We at Sullivan Street Press offer one of them, through our Itinerant Book Show, we distribute lots of publishers and self-published authors' books.

We believe in readers and the good that comes from a society that supports readers and writers and all the good that comes from them taking the time to work together.

Democracies crumble when the books we need to read are not available. An ill-informed population cannot make good decisions about all the things we need to be thinking our way through these days.

And a country that suffers from such a huge amount of data disconnect so that its history and its policies and how they came to be are lost will never rise to any kind of greatness. It will just be buried in its own awful collective amnesia. We can then picture ourselves wandering around in a fog, never really meeting or talking or caring about anything except how to get rid of that awful fog of unknowing.