My generation—the generation that came of age in the 1 950s and 1 960s—may be the last one to know the feeling of being surrounded by millions of words that were the products of years of work by authors famous and obscure. For now, in the midst of the 1970s, we are seeing a subtle but unmistakable turning away from such things. The houses of America, I fear, may soon include no room for libraries. The hardcover book—that symbol of the permanence of thought, the handing down of wisdom from one age to the next—may be a new addition to our list of endangered species.

I have a friend who runs a bookstore in a Midwestern college town. He has found that he cannot sell hardback books; paperback books are his stock in trade, and even those are a disappointment to him. "You know how we used to see people carrying around book bags?" he tells me. "Well, now I look out of the window of my shop, and all I see are students carrying packages from the record stores. The students aren't reading any more. They're listening to albums."

And indeed he may be right. Stories of problems young people have with reading are not new, but the trend seems to be worsening. Recently the chancellor of the University of Illinois's branch campus in Chicago said that 10 percent of the freshmen at his university could read no better than the average eighth grader. As dismal a commentary as this is, there is an even more chilling aspect to it: of those college freshmen whose reading skills were equivalent to the sixth-to-eighth-grade level, the chancellor reported that many had ranked in the top half of their high-school classes.