Stephenie Meyer is the worst ecological catastrophe of the 21st century

I went in to work the other day and to see that her publisher released another paperback edition of New Moon (the sequel to Twilight) with a movie tie-in cover. Just in case the fans did not own enough junk.

I think that 10% of our books in the store are written by a Mormon who uses vampires as an analogy for angels (not that I have anything against Mormons. Just the bigoted ones). Seriously though, that is a lot of books. And multiply that by all of the big box corporate bookstores out there. Add in Amazon. Throw in a few independent stores for good measure. It all adds up

The lorax is weeping...

..and not just over Stephenie Meyer. Nora Roberts, James Patterson, Nicolas Sparks. I don't want to censor bad literature. We all need a little garbage in out lives. Once you think about it though, all those trees add up.

It got me thinking about eReaders again. One of my readings for class talked about the information infrastructure, liking it to our transportation infrastructure. There are dozens, if not hundreds of components that let individuals (and commodities) travel around, almost anywhere we want to get. The infrastructure of information is similar, and mobile technology such as the Kindle and the iPhone are additional components to our information systems. Not everything can be on them, but maybe some stuff should.

PS - found a blog on eReaders. teleread.org Maybe some of you already know about it. If you don't, check it out.

maybe the children really are the future...

One day, a few months ago, I was bored at work scrolling through Publishers Weekly's website (I currently work for a corporate chain bookstore, and PW is one of three websites we can access at work - the other two being oure own and NPR) when I came across an amazing study put out by the National Endowment for the Arts, announcing that the number of Americans reading has finally gone up for the first time in almost a decade.

about. damn. time.

"At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some
important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time
in a quarter century," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This dramatic turnaround
shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read,
are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable."

What I find most interesting about the study is that the demographic with the biggest jump were the youngins' - those aged 18-25. At first that kind of knocked my socks off. But after thinking about it for a bit, it did make sense. Right now in the bookstore, Young Adult is the fastest growing section.


Did Harry Potter save the written word?


We are still in the depth of Meyer's post-Potter Twilight mania. Between Charlaine Harris, P.C. Cast, Melissa De La Cruz, Laurell K. Hamilton, You can't walk throughout the store without bumping into at least one tween being sucked into the vampire genre.

Even in our independent reader section (aged 12-15), we are seeing crazy growth. You still have your classics - The Giver, Wrinkle in Time, Where the Red Fern Grows - but also some epic tales joining their ranks: Christopher Paolini's prodigal Inheritance Cycle, Erin Hunter's ever-expanding Warrior Series and my personal favorite Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan. This series is so amazing, I'm convinced that Mr. Riordan is coating his pages with crack and selling them to children. If he wasn't such a good writer, I'd be the first demanding he be thrown in jail....

I have to say, as I shelve in our kids department, it a pretty exciting time to be twelve years old living in today's literary world. So in the end, it's not surprising to me that the younger readers have increased the most in the past few years, and hopefully this will be a trend that will continue to head in the right direction...