WHICH WAY THE LITERARY FUTURE?

With the advent of AI, all signs point to massive overproduction of all literary products: books, ebooks, novels, poems, stories, biographies, histories, translations, you name it– every possible text which can be produced and marketed. Or rather, dumped onto the market.

Amazon? Forget it. They’ve already put a limit on how many books can be uploaded by any one author: three a day! (Only 1,095 ebooks you can produce a year? No, the market won’t be swamped.)

Print books? Libraries where we live are giving them away, or selling them for 25 cents a book.

ARE THERE ANALOGIES FROM THE PAST?

Nothing quite like this. Video games built by Atari and other manufacturers reached a saturation point in the early 1980s, resulting in thousands of unsold games dumped into landfills. The video game industry recovered only when new, strikingly better games were developed.

WHICH IS likely the solution to the book/writer dilemma: way better novels, poems, stories. The status quo is satisfactory to no one but the writer industry– those selling not to readers per se, but to writers. Which frankly applies right now to most of us pursuing the literary game.

NEEDED: A quantum leap in creative thinking. For instance: more human, more passionate, more dramatic and exciting short stories. Cathartically explosive in impact.

Doable? If it can be imagined it can happen.

-KW