The Gurdian

Los Angeles, February 17:

There is a crisis in literature. Readers have stopped reading, and drawn instead to other perhaps more modish forms of entertainment. Sales are down, authors are despondent, salons are closing and literary lunches have become drab affairs. But US publishers have come to the rescue. Literature’s woes, they have decided, lie in the smallness of the print. “Many people over the ripe old age of 40 are starting to have trouble reading, and reading mass market books has become very difficult,” Jane Friedman, president and chief executive officer of HarperCollins said. The answer is obvious: publishers are to make books bigger, thereby making space for larger print on the page and solving in one swoop the malaise affecting literature. Moreover, the books will be printed on higher quality paper.