[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

One thing we should consider is how any work of literature will be consumed. I wanted to start a thread called: The Semi-Ugly Truth: Ebooks vs. Audio Books. There is a disturbing trend in libraries that offer more audio editions of a book than ebook versions.

It's not a disturbing trend if you are visually impaired.

Those who like to read words on a page are relegated to borrowing pbooks.

There are a couple of good reasons for this. The first is that e-books and p-books overlap in a way that audiobooks and books you read yourself don't. The second is that most libraries have accumulated audiobooks over the past 25 years or so (longer if you include books on tape); most libraries have only been accumulating e-books for the past 5 years or so. I would suspect that the rate at which the library is acquiring e-books is greater than the rate at which they are acquiring audiobooks, even if the absolute numbers don't match yet.

We are becoming the minority. The educational standards in the states are going to pot. Young people spend more time watching TV and playing games than reading. Their ability to read quickly is diminishing, and their vocabulary and spelling are juvenile.

This was as true in 1965 as it is today, though.

A well-educated person should be able to read at least 10,000 books in a lifetime.

As others have pointed out, this is a ridiculous number.

Also, reading a lot doesn't make you educated. That depends entirely on what you read. For most people, myself included, reading is primarily a leisure time activity; it is not inherently better than watching TV or listening to music.

These future generations may barely reach the same level of literacy as their predecessors. Books will be spoon fed to them in audio or audio-visual mediums, very likely on a mobile device. The device could even be modeled after Google glasses. Boys and girls who have trouble reading long sentences may have their books colorized, to highlight keywords. Lol. Now, the decline in reading may not even be related to literacy.

This is a kind of strange claim, since I'm pretty sure that the amount of reading young people have done since the Internet became widespread has increased significantly. You can decry texting and social media - but in the 80's and before we didn't pen long letters to keep up with our social circle; we just talked on the phone.

Shifts in future occupations may be focused on technology, where expertise in a programming language is more important than knowledge of a social language. This is a world where Java or C++ are the lingua franca, not English or Chinese.

??? This makes no sense. Java isn't an actual language; you can't go to a bakery and order a dozen muffins in Java.