I think it was Will Rogers, the homespun comedian, columnist and actor, who is probably unknown to most people under seventy, who once said something like “If a pipe was attached to congress you would have enough hot air to heat every home in America.”

If you attached a pipe to the Internet, by that measure you would have enough hot air to heat the entire earth under a suffocating cloud that would make the direst predictions of global warming a mere glowing ash in a spent bonfire.

I am a miniscule consumer of but an atom of what is out there in cyberspace. Normally, I “read” ten or more on-screen newspapers and visit about the same number of so-called information aggregators while browsing through countless other sites: each offering a gaggle of opinions from every spectrum of worldwide political bias known to man.

This usually occurs after I devote forty minutes or less to the home delivered paper edition of the New York Times, a habit I am unable to break after decades of effort. There is no rehabilitative cure for this malady although it does require a daily dose of blood pressure medication. It is only after this feeble attempt at comprehension that I tackle the informative treasures of the Internet. That takes another half hour of my time and I am not a speed-reader.

I note that I have just written four paragraphs and I would be quite surprised if a potential reader who has stumbled across this tome has “read” more than the first paragraph. To them I say welcome and stick around.

In fact, I truly believe that most people in our distracted society do not read past the first paragraph of a body of words. Perhaps I am exaggerating and should use sentence instead of paragraph. Considering the limitations of time, such a method seems to have a certain logic.

For example, when reading the New York Times, I have only to read the first sentence to know exactly what an editorialist or op-ed pundit is writing about. Same old same old. Nothing really new there. Editorials are ho-hum. Op-ed mavens are repetitive and predictable. This one is a self-righteous do-gooder. That one bleeds for the impoverished. This one can’t get Sarah Palin out of her craw. That one is universally nasty. That part of the pundit stew takes about five minutes. I’ll spend a lot more time with those wonderful offbeat feature stories.

When I visit the Huffington Post, I know at a glance what each blogger or alleged reporter has to say, usually by reading the first sentence. Once you’ve established the bias, you know exactly what’s coming next. Ditto for The Daily Beast and the various aggregators like Drudge. I do nose around for something new and original. Occasionally a nugget does emerge, but it is rare.

For those who are politically like-minded the reinforcement is salutary, like a warm shower, and the readership is likely to exceed the first paragraph, perhaps all the way to the third or fourth. None of this dismays the writer of this predictable word-bloat. The writer is so caught up in his or her own brilliance that he truly believes that the reader has stayed with him until the end of his effusion. Present company excepted of course. What in the world are you doing staying with me this far into my profound exposition?

Actually, if you continue to develop the “one paragraph” habit you could get so good at it that all you need is a single word to absorb the piece. Eventually, you might even be able to merely glance at the words and in a quick blur get the gist of the writer’s thrust. I am not yet at that stage, but I am getting there.

Of all those gajillions of words being pumped out in cyberspace and onto the imploding printed material, I am willing to bet the barn that most people “read”, perhaps the word should be “glance”, at less than the tiniest sliver of information. The irony is that those who earnestly spend the time at this ignoble occupation truly believe that they are well informed citizens able to make considered decisions on such items as polling, political candidate preferences and other matters that require their participation in the democratic process.

Perhaps I have inadvertently stumbled upon a strange phenomenon. I am beginning to suspect that there are far more writers out there than committed readers. I am astounded by the number of people authoring self-published books, both through e-books and print on demand technology without even considering the amount of composition that is being spewed out on the Internet via e-mails, text messaging and through the infinite social networking sites.

I assume these book writers follow the usual patterns: memoirs, spiritual musings, self-help, instructional material, children’s books, young adults and adult fiction in every genre imaginable. Indeed, they are easily uploaded by authors to all the publishing sites and are available for purchase. It is a thriving business for author exploiters.

There are more than half a million “books” being published every year in the English language alone. Over fifty percent of these titles are self-published with the other half or less published by traditional publishers. With the continued ease of publishing technology one could easily imagine this number to reach millions within a year or so with a backlist at some point in the future approaching over a trillion. Think of the dollar amount being expended, not only on producing the books, but also on the various marketing ploys required to get these books noticed by potential readers.

If we add to these authors the vast amount of bloggers that are pounding away on their keyboards, offering their various nuggets of personalized opinions and instructive material, you get a writing population that is staggering.

Consider, too, that these heavy breathing wordsmith’s are competing with a vast array of visual content providers, pointing their lenses at every manner of human adventure and concocting an endless menu of cartoon animation and you begin to understand that words might actually illuminate the imagination with far more power than the contrivance of the merely visual.

As for the primary subject of this essay, my first paragraph analogy may have a very short shelf life. With so much being written, I wonder if one’s judgment on reading further will be best served by creating an enticing title and, barring that, the mere look of the type of font being used as a reader’s lure.

To tell you the truth, I am overjoyed to see so many writers enter the literacy fray and I wish them luck in their effort to connect with readers. The next essay I write will be about readers to whom getting to the end of a book or blog is a sworn commitment.

As to how many “readers” have reached the end of this essay, I dare not contemplate. But for those happy few that have remained I hope they will consider the expenditure of their time useful.

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It has become the prevailing opinion that people are not reading books with the same zeal, energy and enthusiasm as in bygone years. They could be right, although I cannot understand how people can live a rich, wise and fruitful life without reading works of the imagination. My own life would be bereft without my dedication to reading.

Books have been my life, both as a writer and a reader. I am well aware that younger generations seemed to have eschewed reading, surrendering instead to the lure of other distractions, of which there are many. I’m not sure this is true and I do not explore statistical analysis to prove the point.

I can only judge the joy of reading by my own experience. Nor can I pinpoint how reading became my passion. Perhaps it was because my mother was a passionate reader of popular novels. Between her domestic chores, she would tuck herself away on a living room easy chair and read those novels which she got from the lending libraries that were a staple of life in those days, where for pennies a day you could read books borrowed from a store in the neighborhood without going to the public library which was a longer distance from our modest Brooklyn apartment.

From the age of eight or nine, I haunted the Stone Avenue Children’s Library in Brownsville, about a mile from our home and I can remember arguing with my older cousins on the literary merits of my choices. To me such adventure series as Bomba the Jungle Boy, The Boy Allies, The Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift were the epitome of literature.

It was only years later that I learned that these books were created in a writing factory founded by a man named Stratemeyer who had a stable of writers who ground out these books according to strict guidelines. It didn’t matter to me. I loved them.

I suppose I graduated upward to Robert Louis Stevenson’s great adventure books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and those three great books by Nordhoff and Hall, which began with Mutiny on the Bounty and, if I remember, ended with Pitcairn’s Island. I’m sure, given the time, I could name a hundred others. But it was somewhere around age sixteen or seventeen with the sap rising that I began to seriously widen my range. There was nothing, nothing to compare with my discovery of those great writers who gave joy, solace, insight, wisdom and meaning to my youth. They thrilled me and are permanently engraved in my memory.

Many are out of fashion today and that is a pity, although I seriously believe some will be resurrected and once again revered. Some still are although it may not be fashionable to admit it.

I love the short stories and novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, John  Dos Passos. John Steinbeck, W. Somerset Maugham and numerous others. In college my European novel class at NYU under the brilliant tutelage of Dean Ranney brought me the joys of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Balzac, Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Stendhal, Victor Hugo and numerous others. Many still resonate and have morphed into the popular culture in another incarnation. Les Miz is a good example.

And no literary education could ever be complete without the novels of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, Austin and the Brontës and later ones like those of George Orwell, Doris Lessing and countless others. Indeed, if one hasn’t read Orwell’s Coming Up for Air or Lessing’s The Fifth Child one has missed a blast of glorious insight and two great stories.

It pains me to hear that some of my favorites are not considered in the top rank of great writers in the eyes of the so-called literary establishment. As one who does not believe in literary cliques and fashion, I can still root for the resurrection of the passionate novels of Thomas Wolfe, (not Tom), the great short stories and novels of John O’Hara and Somerset Maugham. Indeed, who, but the most elitist literary snobs, can dispute the wonders of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Stick around long enough and they will make a well-deserved comeback. At least, I hope so.

Call me an ingrate for clinging to such nostalgic hero worship and toting up my own list for grand literary achievements. Oddly, I feel somewhat sad for those who have not partaken of those wonderful writers. In my day, most of my peers had read those works and we could discuss them for hours on end. Today getting even any book discussion going is rare, except perhaps in the formal setting of a book group. In my day a book discussion was a common staple of conversation.

I don’t much care what the so-called literary establishment thinks and champions. The writers I have cited thrilled me and still do. Some time has anointed as classics. Others are waiting their turn. Indeed I have learned to trust my own judgment in what I read and what I write and to hell with the prevailing opinion of others. Not all. Merely most.

Indeed being anointed a literary heavy is often transitory. As proof name ten winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. Stumped? Try five. Do the same for the Pulitzer, then the Booker. This does not mean that I don’t love the novels of my contemporaries. Philip Roth comes to mind.

Reading is a deeply personal experience and reading works of the imagination is one of the great joys of a fulfilled life. If people eschew reading, they impoverish themselves.

It has always been difficult for an aspiring novelist to get published by a traditional publisher. By novelist, I mean those who write mainstream novels that do not fall into any genre slot. The revolution in publishing and the burgeoning and inevitable shift from print to digitization has made it even harder for such a novel writer to take the first step in establishing and sustaining a career.

Worse, considering the long odds of getting a first novel published by a traditional publisher, the odds of a second or third novel getting published are even steeper unless, of course, sales lightening strikes, a very rare event. Even an established writer with a portfolio of a half a dozen or more novels published, perhaps someone whose work has made a best seller list in the not too distant past, is also facing the danger of career extinction under the present traditional publishing paradigm

The genre novelist, meaning one whose writing fits a specific category and all its subsets (e.g. romance, mystery, children, young adult, graphic, religion based, and on and on), has a somewhat better shot at sustaining a career although the field is choking with aspirants. This is also true in the memoir category, many of which are written, arguably, as if they were first person novels.

While this cautionary tale is directed at so-called mainstream novelists, serious writers of fiction, the large majority who consider the act of story telling a sacred calling, are facing the longest odds of all. Even within that category, the confusing subsets of commercial and literary novels, so difficult to define, are having a tough time both at entry level and those with a reasonable track record. Publishers define the latter as midlist novels, a shrinking category.

Today’s author of mainstream fiction published by traditional publishers faces a monumental hurdle. The electronic book phenomenon is accelerating rapidly straining the coffers of the publishing industry. While it is presently single digits in overall revenue of the publishing business, that volume of electronic books will grow exponentially. The future for the traditional publisher is gloomy indeed. And they know it. Their business model is imploding.

So what will happen to the author of mainstream novels and the aspiring author whose gut ambition is to write novels?

The good news is that technology has made it possible for any individual author to publish his or her work and offer it up to a reading public on computers and numerous electronic devices. Businesses are growing like weeds that sell digital conversions in every format including print-on-demand. Such individual efforts outside the traditional publishing paradigm used to be called vanity publishing and have now morphed into a somewhat more respectable name, self-publishing. All barriers to publication have been removed. Cause for celebration? A very cautious “maybe” since the odds of finding a reading audience to sustain a career as a novelist or even make enough sales to cover the costs of self-publishing are slim indeed.

Not only has self-publishing spawned a digital conversion boom, it has opened the way for a flood of new ventures that promise to package the deal and sell the self-published author possibilities and stratagems that will lift his or her authorial name above the chatter. This includes methods to navigate the social networking sites, get reviews on book review sites, promise a high spot on search engines and include e-mail blasts and paid advertising and other allegedly sure fire solutions to achieve greater sales. A new category has cropped up, the so-called writing coach, an occupation that falls somewhere between an editor and a cheerleader or a one-on-one creative writing course.

The entrepreneurial boom in selling a self-published author a path to allegedly realize his or her hopes and dreams is now a swiftly growing cottage industry. Apparently the thirst for writing books is going through the roof in volume and intensity and there is no shortage of “experts” offering novelists a leg up to publishing success for a price.

Indeed, there is enough evidence that self-published authors in the distant past have achieved literary stardom, although those examples are more historic than contemporary with little relevance to today’s glutted marketplace. Nevertheless it is a powerful selling point for the new entrepreneurs in the book world. While not disparaging their efforts, I would only urge caution and consider any touted “success” stories with a healthy dose of skepticism.

To some self-published novelists even the slimmest notoriety provides enough satisfaction to appease his or her ambition to achieve authordom. There is a lot to say for that as well as acquiring bragging rights that one is a “published” author.

Indeed, there are myriad ways to get one’s authorial name out there in the balkanized universe of cyberspace. Some actually result in brief bursts of recognition, like shooting stars that flicker and quickly die.  Many are satisfied to have found such a spot of limited recognition.

Unfortunately, recognition of this type does not guarantee readership or sales. Indeed, a novelist might expend great chunks of energy, time and money into establishing recognition without generating any appreciable sales of his or her books. The imponderable is how this recognition translates into readership and how this readership is moved enough by the novelist’s work to recommend it to others.

Sadly for the vast majority of aspiring novelists there is only the most modest hope of achieving any sort of traction despite all the so-called drum beating hawked by the new entrepreneurs. If one’s expectations are low enough, self-publishing for the wannabe novelists could be a personally satisfying path indeed.

Note I am not in any way disparaging the quality of self-published work. It does not come with the stamp of approval of the traditional publisher, but then those in that business have made some monumental mistakes themselves and most of their published novels do badly, although they do fill up their catalogues and validate their publishing creds.

For the novelist who has already established a brand name through years of producing novels through traditional methods and who is beginning to hit a wall of reduced advances or outright rejection, there are some cyberspace solutions beginning to emerge, but this essay is not addressing their options. That will come at another time.

We are discussing here the mainstream novelists seeking an audience who have chosen by necessity or design to publish his or her own work. Whatever the odds, it is unlikely that they will abandon their hopes and dreams and they will jump at any chance to see their work in some form available to readers. Some will never quit trying, despite the long odds of achieving a readership that will assure a writing career and will try anything whatever the cost in time or money.

Considering that writing a long work of the imagination, a minimum of 70,000 words which traditionally defines a novel, is time consuming and labor intensive, and considering that a reader must consume many hours in reading such a work, one can only admire the tenacity and dedication of those who follow the path of self-publishing. Most are convinced that their novels offer insight, enlightenment, awareness and psychic value to the lives of those who will take the time and effort to read their work. They strongly believe in their talent.  Many dream of that movie deal or adaptations in other languages and many harbor the validation of honors, prizes and celebrity.

Who would dare inhibit such glorious aspirations? Not me. I believe in big dreams. I believe, too, that one should confront them with courage and realism and beware of those who wish to take advantage of this hunger to create and share their imagined world with others.

Whatever the odds, some people really do win the lottery.

Caught in the crosshairs in the current debate on the future of the traditional publishing industry is the often powerless, insecure and hapless author, the supplier of the raw material that fuels the industry.

My discussion here will be exceedingly narrow-gauged since my interest is confined to those authors who compose long works of the imagination, particularly novels, those efforts usually written by obsessed and compulsive souls who consider themselves literary artists, whose need to create their stories is profound and necessary to their mental health and well being.

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Aside from physical characteristics, the most important characteristic that distinguishes a human being is his or her name. For most of my life, I took my name for granted and never, not once, in nearly six decades did I ever meet anyone who had my first and last name in a mirror image combination.

To be sure my last name Adler had some public recognition while I was growing up. There was once a company, apparently deceased, named Adler that marketed what they called “elevator” shoes which had a built-in uplift that added two inches to a man’s height. Beyond that, I never met another person named Adler through school, the teenage years, my Army days and my early working life.

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I once wrote a script for a short film titled “The Year Nobody Gave.” It illustrated the tragic outcome if the money stopped coming to the particular charity that paid for the making of the film. It pointed out the terrible tragedy that would result for the recipients of the charity’s largesse. It was meant to scare the bejesus out of the good people who never gave to the charity and to encourage the regular givers to cough up more money.

I am reminded of that film by a number of recent solicitations on the phone, on the Internet and on the street corners to answer survey questions designed to discover my preferences for various products, political leanings and specific attitudes to this or that.

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For authors who are elated by Google’s action to digitize all out-of-print books and pay out royalties it is, of course, a welcomed development. Despite the challenges by others who fear Google’s power, the concept of out-of-print digitization is here to stay.

Unfortunately, for those authors and their copyright heirs who see themselves as potential financial beneficiaries, I would suggest they don’t break out the champagne.

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On the surface, the surge in the popularity of e-books and the proliferation of devices on which their content can be read seems like a boon to authors. At first blush the benefits seem too good to be true.

Books will never go out of print, a term that will have to be revised. In fact, all books that have been out of print, via Google’s vast undertaking, will be reincarnated. Everything ever written and published will be available to everyone who is tethered to cyberspace, which means the bulk of the literate world.

Moreover, everyone who creates content, whether it bears the indicia of a traditional publishing house or is self-produced, will be able to enter the world library, easily accessible to the eye-balls and minds of every literate person on the planet. Soon, very soon, the availability of e-books will permeate every electronic device across the full spectrum of gadgetry from laptops to cell phones to e-book devices to whatever new technology bursts upon the scene.

Thus the bound paper book as we have known it over the centuries will no longer dominate the business of printing, distributing, wholesaling and retailing content. That cannot be good news for the best selling author, book stores and traditional publishers and it may or may not be good news for the average author who has managed to eke out a living writing content of every category in fiction, non-fiction, and self help for every age and demographic.

It will seem like good news for the writer who will finally be able to have his work available for access by the multitudes. At last, the traditional gatekeepers to the world of publication will be demolished. All fences will be down. Anyone who believes their work should be read by others will have this opportunity for mass dissemination.

Unfortunately, the economic reality for the author and publisher is still illusive. The marketing challenge will be enormous. The day is coming when the marketing universe will shift almost completely to the Internet. Print media as we know it is in its death throes. Television and the Internet are swiftly merging. Availability of entertainment media is proliferating to infinity.

From the point of view of the individual author who cherishes the exclusivity of his lengthy copyright, who has labored with fierce determination to compose original content which he or she hopes is meaningful, important and for the ages, the outlook is somewhat cloudy. In fact, downright discouraging.

Considering that the marketplace will be glutted with perhaps centuries of out of print books with hundreds of thousands added by the vast army of wannabe writers from every corner of the planet, how will it be possible to rise above the cacophony to be heard, noticed and ultimately read? Worse, how can an author’s work expect to be monetized in an environment in which reading matter is mostly offered free of charge.

There is, of course, an opportunity to advertise in various ways on websites where eyeballs will temporarily reside, but the fickleness of an amorphous public will require a complete rethinking of advertising strategies. The cost per thousand measure used for years by advertising agencies is swiftly becoming irrelevant as a measure of real penetration.

How then will the individual author’s work be noticed, huckstered, promoted and monetized? I have been wrestling with that problem ever since I had the notion to digitize my then published novels more than a dozen years ago. Frankly, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that digital books disseminated over the Internet was the future and that original work could be protected through the life of its copyright and forever in the public domain via cyberspace.

Being ahead of one’s time has its psychic satisfactions, but the pace of creation will quickly outrun it. Surely, someone will figure out how to rise above the chatter and find the illusive key to the marketing dilemma. We all know that word of mouth is the only sure fire method of wide dissemination. But what happens when everyone is working their mouths at the same time?

It is obviously a boon to have one’s work available. You might even be able to forward it to vast multitudes. Much of these offerings will land in spam files. Publishers determined to stay in business will hurl fusillades of advertising at hundreds of websites hoping to score sales. They will go on a niche hunt, much like trout fisherman pick the right fly to match the ever changing insect hatch to lure their prey.

The on-line bookstores will be happy to take your money to place your material front and center and allow reviews, both biased and unbiased to analyze your effort. Lots of books will be sold somehow at much lower prices than the traditional paper book. Price points will be vastly changed.

It is still too early to tell what works and what doesn’t in today’s transitional environment. The phase out from the printed to the electronic book is just beginning and will take time to make the shift. The fact is that the book industry is entering a dark tunnel. There might be light at the end, but the chances are it will be greatly diffused with niche bright spots here and there.

At this moment in time many authors should be delighted that their books will be available for readers. That is certainly good news. To be “back in print” is a lot better than oblivion. At least the author will have a fighting chance for recognition, if not fame and fortune.

Dream on.