Crap. Having said that...

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I think the proliferation of other year’s bests and the easy access of readers to short fiction online may have also hurt the series.

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This is a fairly senseless comment, as far as I can see. I mean... Are Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons (and whichever else) _so good_ that they replace the need for a Best Of The Year anthology?

People don't read Year's Bests because there are no other places for them to find short fiction. Online publications have nothing to do with the low sales of such an anthology; I fail completely to see the relationship.

Anymore, most, if not all, of the current fanatastical digest readers are aspiring writers, emerging writers, and industry insiders of same. Online or in print, publishers and writers are clinging desperately to what readers they have, but I believe no one knows how to attract new readers in from the front end.

Print readership is down everywhere. Newspapers, magazines, books, etc. Television, movies, video games and the internet continue to encroach on the typical consumer's recreational time.

I read about this a couple of days ago and it's a real shame. There's a lot of very good short fiction in the year's best that I wouldn't have read otherwise. Even though there's other anthologies that cover similar ground, I really admired the eye of the various editors in picking stories.

Cheers,

Stop complaining and do something about it.

I volunteer with my local First Book organization, but there are lots of literacy groups out there. First Book doesn't cost me a dime, other than occassional gas money. I go to one one-hour meeting a month and every two months or so we do an event. Not a huge or unreasonable time commitment.

First Book's mandate is to put books, actual books, in the hands of kids that might not otherwise get a book of their very own. In October, for Make a Difference Day, we went to the local Salvation Army Day Care. Several of us each read a book to groups of pre-schoolers. We chose dog-related books that day because those of us with therapy dogs brought them along. At the end of each story, the kids got to pet the dog. My Aliza was one of the dogs. When we were through, every one of those kids got a bag containing all six books that were read, plus a couple--from Dr. Seuss to Clifford the Big Red Dog.

I didn't get to go to the December event. The group went to a low income school and split up to cover all the classrooms. They read Polar Express. And every child got to keep what would otherwise be a twenty-five dollar Polar Express gift set. (They cost First Book twenty-five cents). That was 750 kids.

If only a tenth of those kids learn to love a book, that's 75 new readers in half a day. Who knows, in fifteen or twenty years, one of them might come to your book signing.

A few years ago, I tutored reading, writing, math, and computer science in an elementary school. Any further comment would be too political for the forum. So I'll just say, the kids are eager to learn, the tools are there, including the hardware and the wetware. A new generation of potential readers is coming along. Will the fantastical genres capture their attention before they're lost forever?

I've done civic volunteering for groups that would have me. Lately, I've offered and been turned down. I have a few caveats from health complications. The organizations that I recently volunteered for didn't like me making stipulations.

I've done part of my environmental bit, too, planted loblolly pine trees in sustainable forests. 80,000 of 'em over one season. The per capita lifetime consumption of trees in the U.S. is 25,000. My contribution took care of three lifetimes. One of the forests is a few miles down the road. The trees are thirty years old this winter.

Do we still have that? Does that still exist?

Of course, this is only from my person observations. I have no data to back it up.

People talk about the problem, but expect somebody else to fix it. It's kind of the way American culture has been going for the last several years. A product of nanny government, no doubt.

That said, the First Book meeting itself was probably one source of my frustration. We actually have books--thousands of them--and money to give away. And some of those books are awesome. And at least half of the schools that talk poor and want help won't fill out a short form that asks basically how many kids, what age groups or grades, when and how do you plan to give away the books. You know, the sort of stuff that lets us determine that it fits into our guidelines as a charity.

Thanks for telling us about First Book, Meredith.