The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.

When scarcity meant truth

There's something both obvious and unsettling about watching the thing you grew up trusting—the authority of the printed page—lose its grip on attention. Stoppard's observation cuts deeper than just "kids don't read books anymore." He's noticing a real shift in what counts as real, what counts as true. When information appeared in print, it had already survived an editor, a publisher, an investment of paper and money. That friction created a kind of credibility we barely question anymore.

Today we're living in the aftermath of that collapse. We swim in an ocean of words—more written daily than existed in all of history—yet somehow feel less certain what to trust. A teenager might learn more from ten minutes of TikTok comments than from a chapter in a textbook, not because TikTok is wiser, but because it feels immediate and comes from people who seem like them. The printed word had authority partly because it was scarce and difficult. Now authority has to come from something else entirely: personality, community, or the strange credibility of seeming unpolished enough to be real.

The real loss isn't that fewer people read books. It's that we've lost the implicit framework that scarcity creates legitimacy. Everything feels both more accessible and less trustworthy at once.