Why are books getting longer?

[MorgulisMaximus]

14 hours ago, C Rutherford said:

So the real question is why are consumers drawn to media works in the form of fiction and television that at least attempts to be more engaging in detail and scope as well as demanding a longer retention of story particulars?   Do they want a greater investment with a greater sense of return with such plots? Is there a greater demand for more immersive and imaginative complexity due to social and environmental changes? 

 

Exactly! I think the trend is toward more and more immersion in all the realms of entertainment. People want to get closer and closer to an "authentic" experience. This trend has driven the video game industry for the past 30 years. Better graphics, faster frame-rates and more realistic  story-telling. We are currently at the beginning of the Virtual Reality revolution in video gaming. Same for TV over the past 30 years. Higher resolution screens, flat-panels, larger-and-larger screen sizes, curved screens, 4K, 8K, etc....

[MorgulisMaximus]

14 hours ago, C Rutherford said:

 

Tons of people might talk and buzz about Martin's books due to the show's popularity and its pop culture focus.  Those books alone could tilt the scales of a survey in terms of discussion articles online in forums such as Goodreads.  But ti does not actually mean that more people are reading them or that it is due to their length.  Or causing the people who have read them to jump into other longer books than they usually read.  For some it might.  But I'm not sure we have anything that makes it a prevailing trend.

 

Will books be able to survive competition with other forms of media? YouTube alone could be a literacy-killer. Why do you need to bother learning how to read when you can learn everything verbally through videos? Why write read/write emails when you can just communicate by video? Do young people even read much anymore? I think it's possible that 100-200 years from now, reading english will be like reading latin is today...

[redeagl]

2 hours ago, MorgulisMaximus said:

Will books be able to survive competition with other forms of media? YouTube alone could be a literacy-killer. Why do you need to bother learning how to read when you can learn everything verbally through videos? Why write read/write emails when you can just communicate by video? Do young people even read much anymore? I think it's possible that 100-200 years from now, reading english will be like reading latin is today...

YouTube have been here for a decade or more and people are still reading, albiet not much but books are very far from dying.

[Jo498]

Since TV and Radio people have proclaimed the death of reading, writing and literacy. If anything the internet and mobile phones made people read and write far more than TV and old phones without texting option. And remember that reading (and writing) Latin as an important skill outlasted the Fall of Western Rome for more than thousand years and it will probably last as long as the Catholic Church uses it (it actually is a niche skill even today outside the church, e.g. for editions of ancient texts that usually have prefaces and critical apparatus/reports in Latin). So these things change very slowly and I see no reason why it should be different with English (the global language of the last 70 years or so, like Latin in former times) and reading/writing in general.

[MorgulisMaximus]

31 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

Since TV and Radio people have proclaimed the death of reading, writing and literacy. If anything the internet and mobile phones made people read and write far more than TV and old phones without texting option. And remember that reading (and writing) Latin as an important skill outlasted the Fall of Western Rome for more than thousand years and it will probably last as long as the Catholic Church uses it (it actually is a niche skill even today outside the church, e.g. for editions of ancient texts that usually have prefaces and critical apparatus/reports in Latin). So these things change very slowly and I see no reason why it should be different with English (the global language of the last 70 years or so, like Latin in former times) and reading/writing in general.

If the machines take over, will they really communicate by English? I think the machines will inevitably take over... but perhaps it will take 100,000 or 1,0000,000 years. Machines are much better suited for space travel than humans. Mankind has already sent machines across our solar system.

[Rhom]

9 hours ago, Werthead said:

Soap operas have been doing that since the 1950s, Hill Street Blues was doing it in 1981. Shows like The X-Files, Deep Space Nine and (very consciously) Babylon 5 were moving in that direction in the early 1990s. The structure of Lost derived, in part, from JJ Abrams' earlier show Alias. So it wasn't a particularly new move.

 

 

I was going to mention some of these, and also mention 24.  It came out in 2001 and basically is the epitome of telling one story over many episodes.

[Jo498]

10 hours ago, MorgulisMaximus said:

If the machines take over, will they really communicate by English? I think the machines will inevitably take over... but perhaps it will take 100,000 or 1,0000,000 years. Machines are much better suited for space travel than humans. Mankind has already sent machines across our solar system.

This is off topic but let me recommend the Blogs "Do the math" and "The Archdruid's report". The latter is niche and esoteric and often too verbiose but the former is from a "mainstream" physics professor and both might make you *very* skeptical about space travel.