In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
of Morals," published in *1887.*
Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly
funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry
Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire
forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert
Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately
20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way
or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in
soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of
the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention
to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25