Today’s front page news is “Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades.”

This spells disaster for the grumpy-grownup set.

Ever since I was a teenager (the term “teen” having been temporarily out of style then), pompous adults have relished every chance to stereotype their youngers as a gaggle of illiterate nothings.

I like to imagine this was especially true in the ’80s, when haughty “’60s Generation” people were crowding the grumpy-grownup demographic, but no. This habit has been going on long since, and it was going on long before (cf. Steve Allen’s old snipes against that silly rock n’ roll music, or the scene at the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy where an aging George M. Cohan (James Cagney) cringes at some energetic teens singing “Jeepers Creepers”).

More recently, Seattle Weekly’s new management figured the way to capture a young-adult audience (which the paper’s previous managements had either ignored or overtly spurned) was to fire the news department, decimate serious political coverage, and add dumb imitation-Onion faked features.

But this time the grumps can’t get away with their putdowns, at least not without a bigger reality-distortion field.

We’re facing what, a couple years ago, I half-facetiously named the “Long Attention Span Generation.”

We’re talking about teens who spent their preteen years devouring Harry Potter novels, each one 150 pages longer than the one before. Teens who’ve fled the instant-gratification video arcades to immerse themselves in the nonlinear, massively-multiplayer worlds of The Sims and Second Life. Teens who actually understand vast technical parts of the computers, cell phones, and online networks they use.

So, yeah, long-form narrative is quite a familiar concept for ’em. So is the activity of reading itself. (The non-porn parts of the ol’ WWW are all about words; so is text messaging.)

What this might mean in the future: Yes, I can imagine whole chat rooms devoted to Proust and Pynchon. I can foresee neo-Shakespeare fashions in London’s boppingest nightclubs (complete with codpieces, of course).

But, sorry to say, I suspect there will always be stoner boys whose idea of great writing begins and ends with Hunter Thompson.