The Internet no doubt justly deserves a preponderance of the blame for reducing the attention span of most of the western world to the duration of a sound bite. Indirectly, it should probably take the rap for the languid demise of mass-market fiction, too — large retailers, who shall remain nameless, have arm-twisted most traditional publishers to the point of making anything shy of a certain best-seller manifestly unprofitable.

If you still read books in the face of all this, thanks — I still like to write them.

In defense of the Internet and its effect on literacy, it’s made small press publishing viable in a way it never was back when books could only be bought from book shops. Actually, it’s made publishing somewhat Victorian — returning it to a time when writers wrote, publishers published, readers read and shopkeepers sold chickens.

Then as now, it takes some searching to find books worth reading — the Victorians didn’t have access to Google, so it probably took them a bit longer.

Victorian readers also lacked downloadable e-books — all my books are available for the Amazon Kindle tablet.

In addition, my books are available through Amazon’s print-on-demand channel. Victorian publishers would have cheerfully brained each other with their ink wells to possess technology like this.

Print-on-demand books are thoroughly likeable. Amazon’s digital presses print books as they’re sold. There’s pretty much no waste and no devious fiscal thaumaturgy to force the wholesale price down to something less than the original cost of the ink used to print them. Everyone who buys such a book gets one that was printed a few days earlier.

That, and if someone spots a hitherto-unnoticed typo, it’s easy to upload a revised manuscript to Amazon and pretend it never happened.