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.

…on the station’s online program guide, but my lovely interview about the book Vanishing Seattle is supposed to be on sometime between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on KUOW, 94.9 FM in Seattle and streaming on the Web.

I taped a lovely interview yesterday at KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. You’ll hear me plugging the book Vanishing Seattle when the interview airs, sometime next Thursday, 2/15. I’ll let you know the time when I know it.

AND NOW, THIS OTHER PROMOTIONAL ANNOUNCEMENT: My colleagues at Take Control Books are offering a limited-time offer on a bundle of five ebook guides to Mac software. You can learn how to get the most out of your Mac (and iPod to create, manipulate, and organize music, photos, and personal web pages. But hurry: this offer’s only good for a limited time.

…is launching an experiment to create the first “wiki” novel. Anyone can sign up to contribute to it. It will be online and open for contributions for six weeks. The resulting work may or may not be issued in print form.

I’m sure the final piece couldn’t be any more disjointed than the worst committee-written Hollywood movies.

…Here’s a ’40s-era abridged and illustrated version of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The original book was an American “free market” economist’s thesis on how “centralized planning” would always lead to one or another flavor of fascism. Hayek (no relation to Salma) clearly intended an anti-liberal (specifically anti-New Deal), pro-libertarian statement. But, at least in this condensed version, it’s eerily prescient about modern pseudo-“conservative” ideology.

…Vanishing Seattle review out now, this one by Artdish.com’s Jim Demetre. Aw shucks, ya make me blush.

…the past two weeks, instead of writing here:

• Selling Vanishing Seattle books. (It’s only been out less than six weeks, and the third printing is already scheduled.)
• Working temp gigs. Most recently, I was at the Convention Center during the American Library Association’s huge confab. Sorry to report, I don’t have any dirt to report about raucous librarian nights on the town. I was mostly stuck at a desk, fielding questions from exhibiting companies about their “lead retrieval” machines. (They’re magnetic-stripe readers that collect demographic info about any convention attendee who stops by a company’s display booth.)This is one of those meta business-to-business-to-business enterprises that should have been rendered obsolete long ago. But then again, the whole convention biz is something online communication should have rendered obsolete by now. Yet it’s still more-or-less going strong, propping up all sorts of industries (display designers/builders, staging crews, airlines, hotels, restaurants, hookers, cab drivers, caterers, truckers, Pike Place fish throwers, the makers of promotional swag of all sorts (backpacks, brochures, candies, water bottles, pens, golf balls)), all so dispersed people with one professional or social link can all gather F2F (that’s “face to face” in geekspeak), be collectively bored by PowerPoint slide presentations, and dine on overpriced trout almondine.

  My next such gig’s at the Boat Show. It’ll be nine straight days of, well, I never know what.

• Neglecting work on my next book, a history of bodacious Belltown, and on another update to my ebook about digital TV.
• Planning a long-way-overdue reworking of this here blog site thang. I’m not yet ready to say much about it, only that it’ll be a group endeavor with several other bloggers and journalists, and just might be the Next Big (Online) Thing.
• Putting the February Belltown Messenger together. It’ll have the first of two consecutive installments about the new Olympic Sculpture Park. One reason why: The “park” part of the park, the landscaping and the plantings, still aren’t done yet, and even those flora aspects that have been installed will look nicer the closer we get toward spring.

Seattlest.com has posted an email interview with yr. humble author, with a gushing introductory commentary about the book.

A few local shops have the book back in stock this week. But your best bet is still to buy direct, from the link near the top left corner of this page.

As a year begins, our new book remains sold out at many area stores. Some were out of copies even before last Wednesday’s rave Seattle Times review. You can still order it online; and you can email me about getting a personally autographed copy ($20 plus postage). Retail outlets ought to resume having it next week.

Peter Donahue has written a positively gushing review of Vanishing Seattle in the Seattle Times today. It’s just too lovely.

…report selling out of Vanishing Seattle. Thanks to you all, it’s become the surprise local bestseller of the season. Epilogue Books in Ballard will have approximately three dozen copies at 10 a.m. Saturday, if you need yours before the big holiday.

…Vanishing Seattle signing party was even more spectacular and better-attended than the first. Epilogue Books had one copy at the end of Monday’s event. It got 40 more copies by Tuesday evening. Only seven remained at Tuesday’s closing time. The store expects to get more copies in by Friday.

Other outlets report having sold out of their initial stock in one or two days. The following other places are, or were, known to have had it in stock, or to be ordering/reordering:

• Virginia Mason Hospital Gift Shop
• FriendShop (Seattle Public Library gift store)
• Ye Olde Curiosity Shop
• Exclusively Washington (next to Ivar’s at Pier 54)
• Broadway News
• Le Frock Ltd, 317 E. Pine St.
• Ballard Home Comforts
• Portage Bay Gifts, Fremont
• Walgreens (various) in Seattle
• Bailey-Coy Books
• M. Coy Books
• Museum of History and Industry
• Fremont Place Book Co.
• Culpepper Books, Tacoma
• NW Museum store, Tacoma

And it can be attained online, from the link near the top left corner of this page.

After the holidays, I hope to offer autographed copies to site readers.

…impromptu Vanishing Seattle book signing was a smashing success. I met many old and new friends, and Epilogue Books sold all but one of the copies they had in stock. Fret not, however: A fresh batch will be unsealed and unboxed in time for the regularly-scheduled book release party, 6:30-8 p.m. tonight (Tuesday) at 2001 NW Market Street in brilliant Ballard.

…not to trust the mainstream news media: SeattleTimes.com listed the Vanishing Seattle premiere party as a “Hot Ticket,” but then got the date wrong. As a result, many people may show up at Epilogue Books (2001 Market Street in brilliant Ballard) tonight, Monday, instead of the scheduled night, Tuesday. I’ll show up both nights just in case.

…to Steve Mandich, whose blog contains a lovely rave review of Vanishing Seattle.