Robert Fisk's World: Everyone wants to be an author, but no one is reading books

I blame technology. The internet, email – neither of which I use – and the accursed laptop. I curse the laptop for two reasons. Firstly because I use it. Secondly because it encourages hopeless authorship. It's not that everyone with a laptop thinks they can write a book. The problem is that everyone with a laptop does write a book.

They arrive by the dozen, in my Beirut mail bag, unsolicited on my Beirut doorstep, in my European mail. A few are brilliant. Most are awful. They are packed with misspellings, bad grammar and often pseudo-anthropological jargon. "An Ontology of Abstraction and Concreteness" is the subtitle of one heavy volume I was generously handed after giving a lecture in Ottawa. "The Arab Mind as a Function of a Rational Epistemic Orientation" one chapter is entitled. "From Multidimensional Thinking to Dual and Dichotomous Thinking: The State of Intellectual Retreat," reads another. "Social Catalysts of Cultural Collapse." And on and on.