I’ve edit this story from Malcolm Knox in today’s SMH because he has obviously read Will Self’s essays, maybe even Neil Postman. Knox has done some homework on the vanishing Gutenberg mind.

A 2022 Gallup poll found that Americans read less than at any time since the poll began in 1990. Even back in those glory days, the National Endowment for the Arts found that a million Americans have dropped out of reading literature every year. The decline was consistent across all age, sex and ethnic demographics.

The 2021 Australian National Reading Survey found that 25 per cent of Australian adults have never read a book, up from 8 per cent in a similar survey four years earlier.

There’s also a change in the kind of books being read. Booksellers report that “difficult” and “literary” books are on the nose and there is a trend toward “easier” reads. Thank fuck for Harry Potter.

Authors are earning incomes that make the minimum wage look like a dream, according to a recent Macquarie University study. That’s why failed writers end up teaching creative writing. Talk about circles of regression and diminishing returns.

I could rant here in a 2000 word treatise that Marshall McLuhan predicted all this 50 years ago, but I’m too busy looking at the online weather, Fox News and the Ms Universe Pageant, while I’m writing.

During the past year, the new federal government has responded to an appeal from writers and readers to support literature. But as the Miles Franklin-winning author Amanda Lohrey said, more good writing means little if nobody wants to read.

Little wonder then when real estate agents advise you how to prepare your home for sale, the first thing they say is to get rid of all those books. They’re a turn off.

The good news is more women are writing for other women. More authors are people of colour and gays. The ‘literary novel’ will stagger on for another 20 or so years, until is becomes a conversation piece, an antique, an irrelevance.