These days most books are bought by women. Male readers are a lower percentage. Not me, but overall.
How do we recover from a generation that never learned to see the world of their own imagination rather than the worlds created by the imagination of movie makers? It’s like loving comics but then not graduating to the next level of a more detailed world.
30 years ago I made videos for BBN and for IBM Research about how they were going to overcome reading and math difficulties for children. They were going to use computers to fix the problems we saw developing, but the fixes never happened. The problems became worse and the teachers were lost so that the students were lost.
I have a 41’ hallway with floor to ceiling bookcases on each side. And at the end is a library with a 10’ ceiling and a library ladder to reach the tops. Not to mention the bookcases in various other rooms and the boxes of the books that won’t fit stuffed in the closets. And already I’m wondering how anyone will deal with all the collections I’ve accumulated throughout my lifetime.
Bays and bays of books on the Civil War. Professional magazines from my times as Editor - Ada Letters, Lisp Pointers - some of which are probably lost in the dust of computer history from when I started them on xeroxes I got companies to sponsor and mail out to my subscribers for free before I got organizations I chaired to take them on.