Words, Words, Words.

John Naughton's article titled Now anyone can 'write' a book. First find some words... was published by guardian.co.uk yesterday. The story is all about the Kindle opening up publishing to the masses, which is creating a deluge of e-books, many of which are cut-and-paste jobs or rehashes of content published before.

Understandably, all the people in the world who even remotely suspect that they have a book lurking somewhere inside of them have taken to writing thanks to the Kindle platform, with its almost zero cost publishing option and the total absence of middlemen, including an editor! With the sale of Amazon's e-books overtaking printed ones, it's rapidly becoming a free-for-all.

Here's an excerpt from the article. "It's only when one peruses the cornucopia of literary productions available on the Kindle store that one detects the first scent of rodent. One of the most prolific self-publishers on the site is Manuel Ortiz Braschi. When I last checked he had edited, authored or co-authored no fewer than 3,255 ebooks. Mr Braschi is clearly a man of Herculean energy and wide learning, who ranges effortlessly from How to Become a Lethal Weapon in Two Weeks (£1.40) to Herbs 101: How to Plant, Grow & Cook with Natural Herbs (£0.70) while taking in Potty Training! The Ultimate Potty Training Guide! (£0.69). Having inspected Mr Braschi's The Miracle of Vinegar: 65 Tried and Tested Uses For Health and Home! (which, at £0.69, works out at about 30p per screenful of text), I can testify that he is no Delia Smith. But at least he appears to write – or at any rate compile – his own stuff. In that respect, he represents the quality end of the Kindle self-publishing business... Kindle self-publishing, in other words, is metamorphosing into a new kind of lucrative spam. The pollution of a potentially interesting and valuable space in this way is depressing enough. But why is Amazon allowing it to go on? Could the fact that it takes a 30% slice of every transaction have anything to do with it? I only ask."

On a personal note, leaving aside the economics of who's making money and who's not, the world has always rejected fly-by-night writers and recognized the good ones - even if it be after their time. This process, this balance, if one may say so, is achieved by the readers of the world. Now, take a look at what the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has to say in their soon-to-be-updated 2007 survey To Read Or Not To Read: A Question Of National Consequence: "There is a historical decline in voluntary reading rates among teenagers and young adults; a gradual worsening of reading skills among older teens; and declining proficiency in adult readers."

Literary reading is in dramatic decline, with the steepest rate of decline - 40 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups (34% in the UK). They may surf the web, or the read the occasional newspaper, but they do not read books - fiction or non-fiction.

The rate of decline is increasing and according to the survey, has more than tripled in the last decade. According to the NEA Chairman, "this report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflect a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity - and all the diverse benefits it foresters - impoverishes both cultural and civic life."

Now, this is something to be worried about - a world where there is an abysmal fall in reading and a meteoric rise in publishing. One wonders if the balance will be easy to achieve.