Second, I wouldn't make fun of Star Trek fans.  They tend to be higher educated and have read more things like Shakespeare than the average Joe (I don't have the link to source of the information, but I remember reading it somewhere).

I'm going to ramble about for a while here, but I am getting back to the topic eventually. So please put up with me.

 

My experience as a writing teacher, middle school through university,  has been that the more fantasy the student reads, the better the student's vocabulary is. Fantasy is the only popular genre, so far as I know, that revels in vocabulary. Also, a person who plays Dungeons and Dragons is likely to know more about comparative mythology than anybody else out of graduate school. A good player of D&D reads extensively.

 

I don't play Dungeons and Dragons, but my son does. He's schizophrenic, and his mind flies off in all directions. When he was a child, if I told him to clean his room, he would sit down on the floor and cry, because he couldn't break "clean your room" into its component tasks. But if I told him, "Put your books away, put your clothes away, put your toys away, make your bed, and vacuum your floor," he could do all that. When he first got into D&D, he spent a lot of time at the kitchen table drawing dungeons on graph paper. I kept him supplied with graph paper. Later, as I happened to be driving from Fort Worth to Dallas, he spent the entire trip cross-examining me on comparative mythology. I got most of the questions right. At that time he was in middle school and I had an MA.

 

Twenty-five years of D&D later, most of them as an advanced Dungeon-master, he is director of parking lot security at a major stock-car race. By the time he got through examining the overall situation, deploying his personnel optimally, and keeping an eye on all his personnel and everything that happened in his jurisdiction, the race track director said that he (my son) had done the best job of policing the parking lot that he (race track director) had ever seen, and my son was instantly signed to bring his crew back the next year. Playing a much-maligned game, and reading much-maligned "junk" genre fiction,  taught him sequence, analysis, and synthesis.

 

I don't call any books except pornography junk. Even if a kid is only reading Sweet Valley High, at least the kid is READING.

 

My opinion is that there is one main reason why many kids nowadays don't have the respect for the written word that kids several generations ago had: they don't have time to read. Our youngest daughter, about halfway through seventh grade, began begging to be homeschooled. My husband and I vetoed it, until the end of the year. At that time I gave her a few formal and informal tests and was absolutely appalled. She had learned nothing, despite making decent grades. We immediately granted her request, and we had to back her up to third-grade math and have her work forward.

 

One day the weather was thoroughly icky, and she was in her room. She came to me and said, "Mom, a funny thing just happened." When I asked what it was, she said, "Well, I thought I had read just a few pages, but then I found that I was at the end of the book, and then I looked at the clock and I had been reading an hour."

 

I said, "Congratulations, my child. You have learned to read."

 

Of course she indignantly pointed out that she had been reading since the first grade. I said, "No, you haven't been reading. You've been sounding out words, and that was taking so much of your mental energy that you didn't have time to concentrate on what the words meant."

 

How many kids, today, have an hour--or half an hour--or even fifteen minutes--of uninterrupted reading time? This problem can't be solved by the schools; the answer has to come in the homes. The one-eyed monster in the living room has an off switch; it even has an electrical cord that can be unplugged. Once I got so sick of my children arguing about it that I put the television in the attic for three months. They still argued, but now it was over which one of them got to play the piano first. Their misbehaviors got more interesting; I remember once telling Liz that she absolutely could not read the Bible any more until she had finished washing the dishes, and then thinking how happy other parents would be to have the problems I had. Those three months broke the addiction, and they watched TV after that only rarely and for something in particular that they were following--not sitcoms and soap operas.

 

Computers are dandy, but a kid who is addicted to the computer must be required to spend at least half an hour a day reading a book of his or her choice ON THE COMPUTER. This way, the child learns that reading and computers aren't irreconcilable.

 

As a volunteer online tutor, I have many students asking me where they can find such-and-such a book online. If it is public domain, I look it up--preferably on PG--and give the student a link to it. But often the student is asking for a book that is still in copyright, and I have to explain that one has to go to a REAL library for that book.

 

So this is what I mean when I say that when these kids are adults, about ten years from now, they are going to demand computerized books and they are going to get computerized books. Somebody last week mentioned Luddites; I am aware that many people my age (61) are Luddites about computers, but my state--Utah--has the highest percentage of "wired" households of any state in the Union. I do not think that a person who refuses to think about reading computerized books is a Luddite, but I do think that person is not well informed. I think that if that person would try out a Rocket for a week, preferably a week which included several days in bed for flu or recovery from surgery or something like that, that person would never go back to paper books for anything that was available electronically. But notice that I said "think." I could be wrong.

 

I live in a rather small house--definitely too small to be running three businesses from. But given technology that exists RIGHT NOW, everything in the Library of Congress would fit into my house. Everything in the Salt Lake City Library and the Salt Lake County Library and the University of Utah libraries would fit into one bookcase in my office.

 

There are books that, for very good reason, I own in both silicon and dead tree formats. But when my grandchildren are the age I am now, they will think that having all those dead tree books around is a stupid, space-wasting, fire hazard.

 

So what I'm getting at is this: We can't possibly guess the future of ebooks. It's bigger than any of us think it is. Even the best science fiction writers never guessed how we would use computers, and we're still on the edge of that, also. It is really absurd to worry about errors made ten years, even five years, ago. Resolve not to make those mistakes again, but go forward, not back. Don't try to figure out who made the mistakes. That doesn't matter. Go forward, not back. The first telegraph message, on 24 May, 1844, said, "What hath God wrought?" Now, 160 years later, we gripe if television from Mars or Ganymede is a little fuzzy. I don't want to offend the atheists on this ML, but--God is still wrighting. We're part of that process. I won't live to see PG's 60th birthday, but some of you will. What, by then, will God have wrought, using our hands to do the work? But we'll never get it done if we spend all our time squabbling about what somebody should have done five or ten or fifteen years ago. Go forward, not back.

 

My husband has instructed me not to get into any more flame wars because they upset me too much. So I'm going back into watching status, where I spend most of my time anyway. But, good people--and you are good people, all of you, because you wouldn't be pouring your heart and mind and time into this work if you weren't--stop looking behind you. The action is in front of you.

 

Anne