[FuzzBunneh]

News posts from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/306531_teenlit08.html)

"Kids are buying books in quantities we've never seen before," said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. "And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven't seen since the 1940s."

(...) Not only are teen book sales booming -- up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis -- but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

Hey hey, isn't that good news? Today's bookworms are tomorrow's writers, aren't they. I've been very optimistic about reading trends among teens and am glad to see that the so-called "cultural declinists" who regularly decry the Internet's nefarious effects on reading don't have the right of it.

I was surprised that there wasn't more about Harry Potter in there, but perhaps that's just me having any extremely skewed and misinformed analysis of the situation.

Anyhow, I thought this might interest SFFWorld's readership.

[ArthurFrayn]

I chalk it up to the internet, and the fact that the writing and reading of text is now a daily source of communication and information for kids.
Gotta read today!
Just as written correspondence accompanied the reading of fiction in previous centuries.

[Hobbit]

Is this where we talk about the influence-of-Potter?

Even if you're not a fan, you can't deny the impact of it on getting kids to read; or even getting adults to read it and then kids copying adults.

And 10 years ago, books were seen as dead or at risk of dying out.

Of course, we may be looking at e-books before long. :)

Hobbit

[Kailana]

I find that young adult books are better than they were when I was a young adult. I read more now that I am in my 20's than I did when I was in my teens. Lots of series have been making the rounds, and it is not just teens that are reading them, adults do too. I am rather, um, anti-Harry Potter, but I can even admit that they have encouraged reading in ways that I have hardly seen.