You make some very good points about those too unsocialized, too unmotivated, too "declasse," as it were, to even enter the age of reading that began 500 years ago. A question though: What about the 3 million hard-working, reading, middle-class folks who have been downsized into oblivion the last three years alone? What about the tens of millions of readers who had the skills needed for the industrial age, but not for the information age? Well, change means pain, and we'll get to the millennium one way or another. But we can do it the hard way or the easy way. The hard way means severe social dislocation, possibly even threats to democracy. The easy way seems the smarter approach -- no serious effort at reforming education and at skills retraining has ever been undertaken, and it seems a better use of our tax dollars than most of the crap it's spent on now. David