A friend emailed an article about B. Dalton closing the only bookstore in Laredo, Texas, one of the largest cities in the U.S. at 250,000. Here's my email to him:

Scott responded to this development with "buy books online at Amazon." So we talked about why bookstores are good (for browsing) but for some of us not as important as the library. A large city without a library is a tragedy. And what is a library going to be in the future now that Amazon and the Internet are here? Boston's Cushing Academy apparently has decided to no longer acquire or "service" books; everything will be online. The Cushing decision is mentioned in this article on the future of reading in the Duke Magazine titled "The End of Civilization as We Know It?" Very interesting discussion. I tend to worry as the novelist does. I like to see the physicality of books on shelves and to respect the work of authorship. Collective authorship, as Wikipedia and other initiatives rely upon, has its drawbacks. I also worry about literacy, as defined by the Duke English professor. She sounded cautiously optimistic that "professional readers" will always be necessary, but I asked Scott why professional reading ability and "Internet savvy" have to be mutually exclusive, and I fear that either people will ignorantly make them exclusive by not promoting the type of reading she mentions or callously dismiss the importance of professional reading.

I have a personal stake in this, obviously. While I wait for responses from traditional gatekeepers to publishing (it's been three months since I submitted 50 pages to two literary agents and three weeks since I queried a new set of agents), I ponder the revolution underway in how and what people read and how they choose what they read. The old questions from agents and publishers have been: who is your reader for this novel? where would this novel be shelved? While traditional publishing is still operating, and in my opinion still the best way to succeed as a novelist, I find myself wondering if the chaotic publishing scene is one of opportunity for those who have the wherewithal and the savvy to act (and I don't know whether I have either). Is the digital revolution in reading an opportunity or a demise? Can I publish myself and be read or will I just get lost in the deluge? Will traditional editors even matter to a less-literate reading population that doesn't buy books?

An old grad school friend who recently found me on Facebook (which I joined because novelists are supposed to be social-media literate) confessed to me that he hasn't read more than a few pages, and none "linearly" in years. He buys books (good for those selling books) and dips into them to sample their language, but he doesn't really care about the narrative arc or the totality of the story. This astounds and terrifies me. He's highly literate and cares about language, but he's the reason that cell phone "novels" are being written (they are very popular in Japan). No one wants to spend time on an extended story (see the comment in the Duke article by the Time book reviewer, Lev Grossman, about literary instant gratification).

In the future, I worry that not only will "professional reading" as defined by the Duke professor be a dying art, but that the kind of writing necessary for a novel or even a complex piece of non-fiction will be impossible if the cognitive skills necessary for them are traded for those developed and strengthened by surfing the Net. I fear that we are moving to a world where the diagnosis of ADHD will disappear because the "normal" population will lack the ability to focus on more than a few sentences at a time, making coherent and extended arguments impossible. Then again, maybe the average person has never had much ability to do so and maybe serial and oral storytelling will make a comeback. As I read A Thousand and One Nights, I envision that these short tales are perfect for our modern sensibilities. Yet the overriding framework, the guidance of a master storyteller who creates a meta-story that synthesizes and shapes a narrative, is absent.