The decline in book sales is interesting. On top of there being many new titles published there are also a great many catalog titles which are being re-published in either POD or ebook form.

There a great many catalog titles I'd love to read if they'd just get the price point right. I bought the first three seasons of Breaking Bad for $10 each. And yet it still costs $7.99 for a single ebook of a 1989 novel. Not that the explosion of sales of cheap catalog titles will do anything for new books... which may be why they don't do it.

I bow to that child for living his dream. He will go far in life if his imagination (and the thing that carries it around) survives to adulthood.

The slippery slope is apparent especially for non-fiction works.

What publishers say is that of those who buy a book, only 10% open it up and read it. Of those who start to read a book, only 10% make it past the first chapter.

What that says is that books are somewhat informational, but also totemic. They are a representation of an idea as well as a description thereof.

As books become e-books, they become more like blog articles, easily scanned, and searched for the "meat". But blog articles are free, and often a good reviewer (like a modern Preview at a movie house) can summarize just about all the main points in an article.

What is more, we are moving from an oratory style society to a conversation style one. People want to read, jump to conclusions, and comment. I see this on Facebook, where 90% of the people aren't clicking on the links to the articles, but will ramble off their opinions. Clicks on videos are also notoriously low. People see something and they "get the idea".

In other culture news, the Santa Fe Opera is going to debut an opera about Sun Yat-Sen this summer (from here:)
"Dr. Sun Yat-sen depicts the epic struggle to overthrow China’s ancient monarchy and build a modern national identity for one of the world’s oldest civilizations."

An opera glorifying a movement that has one fourth of the world's population living under a strict totalitarian communist regime? I'm sure there's more it than that, but it is rather astonishing.

Paperbacks for $5

Just saying

@5, Sun is not Mao. Sun led the revolutions against the Chinese dynastic empires. He is revered by both the ROC and the PRC, the two sides of the Chinese Civil War. Sun didn't set up either the corrupt pseudo-Western civil law based Republic nor did he take sides with the totalitarian Maoists.

Who knows what he would think about China 100 years after his revolution.

@7 Thanks for the clarification.

@7 - yes thanks.

The Santa Fe opera is a delight. It's open stage in the back, so you sometimes see evening summer New Mexico thunderstorms and lightening in the distance adding nature's embellishments to the performance.