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Jack Campin wrote:

I like real books best too. However, I must admit that the book I'm
currently reading would be much easier to handle on a Kindle. I had
an especially hard time reading in bed last night (I just started it
yesterday). It's 11/22/63 by Stephen King. It's a very good book,
but it is humungous, and my hands aren't as strong as they used to be.

That suggests a truly grim possible development.

Books (particularly popular genre fiction) started to bloat as soon
as authors got their hands on word processors. If you had to write
every word with a pen, or bang out every letter on a typewriter for
every rewrite, you had a built-in incentive not to use any more words
than necessary. But even with authors using word processors and
outliners to keep track of all their superfluous characters, there
was still a physical limit to how big a book you could expect to sell.
Don DeLillo's "Underworld" pushed at it, Vikram Seth's "A Suitable
Boy" went way over it in its hardback edition for a lot of readers.

But now every book can weigh the same and there is no limit to
logorrhoea. People have been softened up to tolerate garrulity
by blogs that go on forever.

A future where civilization winds down to a dead stop as people freeze
into pupa-like immobility while reading interminable stories on their
e-readers. Perhaps Stephen King could write a book about it...

Actually, I don't agree that word processors are to blame. Publishers
are pretty strict about the number of words per book, depending on ...

(Oops, here's where I give away my lack of knowledge, because I don't
remember what exactly it depends on. But a friend of mine is in the
process
of having a memoir published, and she had to cut it down to 90,000 words
because of, um, *something*. Different categories of books have different
maxiumum lengths, I just don't remember what the categories are.)

My theory about Stephen King is that he's an exception, and can do
whatever
he wants. His books badly, *badly* need editing, but why would his
publisher pay an editor? His books are going to be bestsellers no matter
what's in them.

--
Joyce

Many of King's books have been big ones, although none as big as this one.
I'm well into it now, and, while it isn't at all what I was expecting (at
least not so far), it's holding my interest as most of his books do, and not
grossing me out as much as many of them.

Incidentally, a couple of Isaac Asimov's books were pretty large, and he
refused to use a computer or word processor.

Joy