OpEdNews - Diary: Working for us all--Jobs for Book Lovers, 9

We had originally wanted to call the Itinerant Book Show, Reading for Democracy, but that sounded not at all like what we were doing. Yet in terms of the concept, it is precisely what we are doing.

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It does not take a wizard to figure out that this country is doing poorly when it comes to how it reads and writes. I am not talking about test scores or reading levels or even book sales or the numbers of books published per year. None of those numbers can truly reflect what has gone terribly wrong in the world of books over the past couple of decades.

Basically the problem stems from a couple of really obvious factors both of which have to do with the ways in which the business of publishing changed.

By allowing the overzealous mergers of many of the more adventurous companies and their take over by either foreign media companies or by companies motivated more by profit than quality the beginning so of the rupture began.

The other obvious culprit became the means of distribution.

I am not sure if finger pointing will change the nature of publishing, but certainly when we know some of the causes for the problem, more of us can be involved in the solutions.

Ultimately that is my goal. To help us all find the ways in which to rescue the creation of books from the hands of those who do not really understand why we read. Whenever we allow accountants to determine, along with their faithful counterparts, the marketing departments, which books will be published we end up with situations like those we find ourselves in now.

And we end up with writers being excluded based on things like the arbitrary rules that get established so that we can be certain of having an unending number of vampire stories no matter how bad they are because we are being programmed to buy them.

I could and will go on and on about the horrors of this type of programming, but while you are waiting for my next installment to this discussion, I suggest you read Neil Postman's excellent explanation of this phenomenon by reading his book, Amusing ourselves to Death.

That is all for today. Except to say if you are interested in becoming a Bookie, please go to our website http://www.sullivanstreetpress.com and write to us. We love to hear from everyone.