An editor talks about how J.K. Rowling’s books opened up the world of children lit, and he strays into how nice he thinks it would be to have fewer books printed.

Roger Sutton says we’re pressed to believe children don’t want to read, but they are “reluctant to read what? If you put down that novel and look around, you will see that lots of so-called reluctant readers are reading plenty; they just aren’t reading fiction, which in this age constitutes ‘real reading’ as defined by ‘real readers’—mainly teachers and librarians.”

On the future of print publishing, he says, “Every author in this room is going to disagree with me on this, but there are too many copies of too many books being published. A little curation would be a good thing.” So if libraries were the place to go for holding a book in your hand, then we would have a sane publishing world. Is he ignoring home libraries, or does the future have room for that?