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Literacy and Reading: The Path Least Trodden
There are, we are told, more books being published and bought than at any other time in modern history. A positive flood of new works appear throughout the world practically every day, and the competitive literary marketplace has become a fighting ground, vital with literary supremacy as much as with an ever increasing amount of low-grade slop from Artificial Intelligence compilers. On the one side this is to be greeted, while on the other the question arises over who exactly is writing and buying all these new works? The answer to the first part of this question is simple: there is a wealth of talent either entering or already within…
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In Whom Do You Place Your Trust?
In the days of my youth – and much of my time now, as an old person, is spent remembering youthful years – people who wanted to have their books published either had to go through the rigours of a publishing house, with or without an agent on their side, or pay a vanity press to publish the work for them. Vanity presses advertised in what we would call the gutter press, the yellow press, the tabloids; those publications with little intellectual depth, plenty of not necessarily serious advertising, and a high readership; something which has, sadly, not disappeared from the world to this day. A few years ago things…
