Poll: Literary Apocalypse.

[the Dept of Science]

There

There were always terrible books.

Never this many though. Or this many books in general.

The circle of literate people nowadays (I use "literate" in the loosest sense, but the distinction is still true) dwarfs the entire amount of literate people from centuries past combined. And a great number of those people fancy themselves authors, at least in a passing sense. Likewise, technology has made it relatively easy to get published when compared to, say, 1700. Once a few hundred books would be published and thus more likely to be noticed by the literate community (which was small, but whose tastes now define the same community when it's large, ie Jane Austen is the bomb etc). In the same time period nowadays tens of thousands (maybe hundreds) of books will be, and they will be read by a collective audience of a few billion. Plus fanfiction, which has almost no barriers.

So anyways there has never been this much quantity of literary output in human history (or earth history, I don't even want to touch theoretical alien tween romance), and it will probably increase with population and literacy. This of course means there are inevitably more bad books, and these books are more likely to be published and more likely to receive increasingly large amounts of attention compared to their more esteemed peers.

And yes, crime and political thrillers are frequent but there are a f*ckton of romance novels. Load and load and loads of mainstream romance, plus erotika stuff, plus the tween novels that Twilight made so infamous. So many that the romance genre is considered a reliable barometer for cultural trends (was vampires, now according to TIME it's soldiers and veterans) The most profilic modern romance writers have written hundreds of books, which rivals if not eclipses the old dime novel writers. Interestingly these writers hail increasingly from the upper echelons of education, the ivy leagues. Where once the prospect of a professional, serious writer writing three genre books a year would have been highly implausible, well....

My point that I'm buzzing in circles around is that alot of people are writing alot of hokey stuff and will be doing more in the future. This is probably unavoidable. Most people can't write well but that won't deter them from throwing their hat into the ring, ie fifty shades.

What I find interesting about this phenomenon though is that you would think that this greater literary output would result in less unity, but it appears that the opposite is true.
The internet has made writing more accessible than it has ever been. Anyone can write something, put it on the internet and then have anyone read it. You would think that would mean that niche genres would turn into little online communities. Self contained little bubbles where the authors can easily find their own small audience and visa versa.
However, Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest selling paperback of all time. There may be more readers and writers but ever before, but 90% of people seem to be gobbling up whatever has been put out by an amazingly small number of writers. James, Mayer, Larsson...

The doomsayers have to remember there is a positive side to this:
A Game of Thrones is selling almost as many copies as those other books.

ps. there's been a similar thing happening in music. This documentary may be quite enlightening:
http://vimeo.com/34608191

 

[Total LOLige]

Everything will be just fine. There's bound to be some shitty material every couple of years at least. Something truly awesome will pop up, I'd say the good books out weigh the bad.