[Worldwalker]

I don't think there has ever really been a time which combined wide literacy and easy availability of books with conditions what were otherwise safe to live in.

Take, say, the Middle Ages. Let's say that you lucked out, and instead of an illiterate, starving peasant, you got to be a rich, literate noble (hard enough, since many nobles were illiterate too). You would have access to a library. If you were really lucky, it might hold ... 50 books. Any time pre-Gutenberg is just going to royally suck because there simply were no books, and few people to talk about books with.

Generally, any time and place prior to the 19th century, and outside a city, is going to be short on books and equally short on people who care about books. The lower classes worked, all the time, and when they weren't working, eating, or sleeping, they couldn't afford books anyway. When we think of someone with a lot of books, we're talking about dozens, not thousands. Upper classes could afford books, but very few did, because they had other, more important things to do with their time: visiting each other, for instance. If you were one of those oddballs who stayed in your room and read books, once again you'd be in the situation of having nobody to talk about your books with.

The exception has always been places where students and teachers gather. They have books, at least in the form of libraries, and they want to talk about their books. That's as much if not more true today as it was at any time in the past. If anything, the big difference today is places like MobileRead, where we can find each other and talk about books.

It's easy to look back and say that at some point in the past, some book was popular. The part that you never realize is that it might indeed have been popular among some segment of society, but they were the few who read, and it was that book, but not the hundreds of thousands of other books that we have access to today. Yes, there as a brief time in which people read because they had the literacy level to be able to read and the things they really wanted to do (TV, computer games, etc.) hadn't been invented yet, but there were fewer of them than we think, and in terms of sheer number of books read, they didn't come close.

So, personally, I'm quite happy about the time and place I live in. I certainly don't want to be a starving peasant, or someone with access to 50 whole books and thinking I'm lucky, or even someone living for any reason in the days of infantile paralysis and the iron lung. We have more books, and access to more books, today than anyone ever did in history, and if there are people who aren't interested in them, that's how it's always been; at least now we can find the people who are.