Are There Better Books Today?

I was thinking about last Friday's post about how Amazon is changing the rules on the POD publishers and I started thinking about how many more potential books there must be today in comparison to fifty years ago.

And going back even further, before the typewriter, people had to write out their work by hand, go back and check and do all their rewrites by hand. That work alone must have turned off the majority of people who had an inkling that they might like to be a published writer.

Today with kids being able to touch type practically from the time they enter grade school, people can write out what they think, almost as they are thinking it. (Hence why blogging is so popular.) People who fifty years ago would have been considered idiots when it came to spelling and grammar can simply run 'spelling and grammar check' and while it doesn't fix everything it certainly fixes a lot more than what happened before computers. (I just spelled grammar wrong and my computer practically shouted out loud that it needed to be fixed.) And where writing groups might have once been hard to come by, the internet makes it much easier for people to exchange their work either through email, online groups, online workshops, etc in order to polish their work to a higher level than ever before.

So I was thinking that there must be a lot more 'quality' books out there than ever before. Since people who in the past might have had a great story to tell or lesson to teach are now able to easily put their words into writing. But on the flip side, the agents and publishers out there must have to weed through huge fields of material where they used to have just a nice manageable pile of submissions.

What does this mean will happen in the future? Is the day of the formally published book coming to an end? The music business is already seeing the impact of their work being exchanged in digital format and eventually if e-books catch on, this could be a concern for writers as well (maybe it is even now.) In the music business, people will pay to hear their favorite performers live... if a writer spends years on a book and everyone exchanges it digitally, will writers be able to make any money? If writers can't make any money will quality books disappear?