- Bestsellers Are a Woman's World, Baby
Male writers may soon become obsolete, according to a new study by POD publisher lulu.com. After conducting a study of the bestselling books of the past 50 years, the website has boldly predicted that writing books will soon become a woman's job. "If present trends continue," the company announced in a release, "bestsellers by women will imminently overtake those by men, before going on to make male bestsellers extinct."
Now I don't know about that, but who does. I bet that if we took trends in some other professions, we would discover a similar one, like doctors and lawyers for example. Some law and med schools now have more females enrolled than males, but does that mean lawyers and doctors will soon be all female? I doubt it. But it's good to hear that women are progressing in so many areas. - Gritty Books Appeal to Teens
Teenagers belong to a generation that's more literate than any other in history, says David Booth, a children's book author ... But he cautions, "Don't confuse literate with literature. One is process and the other is product. The question shouldn't be, 'Is my kid reading?' but rather, 'What is my kid reading?' "
Television's impact on reading is obvious in the evolution of the wildly popular graphic novels and Japanese manga, genres particularly popular with young boys.
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Kids read all the time at their in school and on their computers, "but what I'm missing in kids is time spent in reflective, intensive text," Booth says.
I'm still not 100% certain what all this means. It's probably a change that we (non-teenagers) have a hard time comprehending. We can grasp the change in the publishing industry, we can see it with the internet, print on demand etc., but can we grasp the change in literature? I mean, can my parents listen to grunge or techno music?
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2 comments:
I think it's the same as the old comics versus real books argument. Increasingly, what kids read can be defined as picture-intensive and mainly dialogue. The point is that they are losing the ability to read solid and extensive blocks of text without illustrations - what we call books, in other words...
Clive, thanks so much for dropping by.
I fully agree that comic books and text books are different, but is that really all that teens read?
I'm in contact with many teens, and I see them read a lot. It's even enough to look at Harry Potter and other very successful YA books to rethink this whole attitude about teens. They might be reading more "visual books" than previous generations, but they're also reading a lot of text books.
I hope I'm right, anyways.
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