One codicil to your argument. Magazine advertising was very much targeted, just not at the individual level and specialty internet sites can do the same. Vogue did not run the same ads as Byte.
Well, I don’t have the option of walking into a store, watching some ads, and walking out of the store with whatever I want.
I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.
Basically all the people that have the revealed preference that they’ll however grudgingly pay with their attention than tossing down cash for most content.
These people do exist, but there's also the strong friction against filling out all your personal information (including credit card info) into every or entertainment site you thought interesting and then agree to some term with auto-renewal, etc. etc. Like maybe it just had the one good article/video/recipe or whatever. This is really an unworkable solution. For a pay-per-use internet sites to work, the payment has to be cheap, easy, trustworthy, and fast. This does not yet exist.
Micropayments have been tried through third party networks but they’ve never worked. Mental transaction costs is one explanation. People want “free” is probably the other.
Saying "people want free" strikes me as a warped view of the dynamic. It always seems presumptuous to me to think that people would be willing to pay to read what you have to say merely because you said it. Most authors online aren't Socrates. Ads on the web are mostly on sites centered around idle distractions/entertainment. People pay exactly what that sort of "content" is worth: nothing.
It can get tiresome—but, reading as an adult, may have been one of the more interesting parts of the book as I was familiar with the Ahab thread 100x over.
In the Shakespeare case I’m not even sure reading plays in their entirety is the best way to gain exposure. Plenty of good and reasonably faithful film versions out there.
You really effectively need a smartphone for more and more things. A few days ago I had to pay for parking with an app. In a couple hours I’m going to a theater that only takes tickets in digital form.
On the other hand, I’d be very happy to take the side that assigning a 1500 page 19th century novel in high school is a really heavy lift. You might as well beg students to read the online equivalent of the Cliff Notes.
Nowhere in the Atlantic article does it mention students being asked to read all of Les Miserables, either in high school or college. I think the OP brought it up as a strawman because it is notoriously digressive, and has few fans these days. The books actually mentioned in the Atlantic article include My Antonia, Great Expectations, The Illiad, the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice.
That's because I'm responding to her substack post, not the article. The substack post references Les Miserables and that professors are sounding the alarm for students not finishing it. Presumably, if professors are upset that students aren't finishing it, they are assigning it to be read.
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