The Golden Age of Books: Doing our part!

At his blog Well-Read Life, Steve Leveen, CEO of Levenger has started a series he's calling The Golden Age of Books. He explains:

Today there is plenty of hand-wringing about how a barrage of new media are stealing time away from reading. Government studies reinforce with statistics what we see by looking around: young people find 3D video games and Facebook more interesting than Jane Eyre. 

Since our business is tied to such social changes, I continuously query people about their reading habits. Yet what I’m finding makes me feel encouraged rather than discouraged about reading, especially the reading of books.

In fact, from all the good news I see, I’m going to suggest that we may be entering a magnificent new era in reading that is already far better than anything we had in those good old days, whenever they might have been.

Mmmm... we JJLers like the sound of that!
We certainly are doing our part to contribute to this Golden Age, loving all the choices we have with reading by talking about them here. (Have you signed up to review one of your books yet?)

I'm interested to read all the reasons Leveen plans to share in his series. His first is this:

Our Historic High Tides of Books

We are swimming in books. In both the number of titles, and the sheer quantities of books printed, the world has never seen anything like what we have today. In 2004, the last year statistics are available, the global production of books in English amounted to a mind-boggling 450,000 titles.

The U.S. production alone increased 15% between 2002 and 2006, surging from about 250,000 titles to 300,000 per year. The only genres of books to show declines over these years were juvenile and computer books. Yet more than making up for those declines are significant increases in poetry, drama, religion, philosophy, fiction and biography...

Yet another convincing argument for A Love Affair of Books and how it will help us identify some great choices! The variety of genres to expand my horizons to is one reason I so look forward to our annual forum of book reviews, for personally I do get stuck in my non-fiction business-reading habits, and as Chris pointed out, there is a far larger wealth of literary (and poetic) richness to choose from.

How about a quick poll?

Drop a note in the comments: What genre did you last sample in your reading?

Comments

[dave]

non-fiction business

[Steve Leveen]

Dear JJL Community,

What a delightful site! Life long learning--and the joy and even wisdom that brings is what fuels us at Levenger to develop good gear. And tools for reading also include ideas, which is why I love passing on good techniques for getting more books in your life and more life from your books.

Thanks for mentioning the first post in the series I'm doing on why we are just now entering the Golden Age of the Book.

All best wishes with your worthy pursuits.

Steve Leveen
CEO & Co-Founder
Levenger