Too Many Books

Too many books are being published today, placing too great a demand on the modern reader’s time. Why does humanity need so many? The truth is that we don’t really need 90% of them. If far fewer books were published then we could focus on the ones that really matter. In the prologue to the second part of Don Quixote Cervantes writes: “For I know very well what the temptations of the Devil are, and one of his greatest is to put it into a man’s head that he can write and print a book, and gain both money and fame but it . . .”  He goes on to say that “bad books are harder than rocks.” We might say today that it is not the devil who puts the idea of writing a book for money and fame into someone’s head, but rather it is a kind of madness. That madness has overtaken many well-intentioned people who, like Don Quixote himself, are afflicted by a delusion, the delusion that they can write a book of importance which should be published.