Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
The best way to prove him wrong is to list current authors that produce works as significant as those mentioned in the blog. If you can't, then maybe he has a point.
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It's a lot easier to find the "significant" novels fifty or a hundred years later. What criteria do you recommend to judge which ones are significant enough?
There are still plenty of intense, passionate, well-written, mind-bending, life-changing novels being written. Their numbers are likely higher than ever, but there are less percentage-wise than used to be; the free-publishing-for-all phenomenon has moved them from "needle in haystack" to "grain of sand on the beach."
The explosion of media means that not everyone has read the same books anymore, just like the explosion of cable tv meant that networks can't count on the millions of viewers they could in the 60's.
2005:
~300,000 new books in the US, a stable rough number for many years. If even three hundred of those were "new classics" that would stand the test of the ages, that's .1%. No one person was going to have read them all, and most readers would never have come across any of them. And I don't think three hundred books a year have that much longevity.
2010:
3,000,000+ new books in the US. If 300 of them are going to last... that's .01%. The majority of readers--even avid readers who go through more than 50 books a year--will never have heard of the handful that are going to last.