I must confess, I was a little disappointed in this book. I had somewhere read or heard an enthusiastic review, so my expectations were high, but it did not live up to them. The form was a rather fairly-tail like series of episodes which were essentially commentary on the publishing world. That meant the book had a certain simplicity and was easy to read, but it did lack depth. Ironically, one of the passages in the book complained that modern books are too easy to read and lack depth. Was this supposed to be ironic? I was not very convinced by some of the complaints against the publishing industry. For instance, that there is a preponderance of summaries and abbreviated texts these days. Maybe that is a feature of Japan today, but for me that sounded like the popularity of Reader's Digest books and magazines in the 1970s, which I am not sure even exists any more (apparently it still does, but I haven't seen one for years). Likewise, speed reading is a phenomenon that I thought was from a few years back.
Another complaint is that the publishers focus on what people like to read rather than books that would be good for them, more difficult books. Firstly, I am not enthusiastic about that sort of elitism, reading is reading, and secondly that is also not something that I actually observe. Yes, there is a huge variety of popular books published, more than ever before I believe, but there are also plenty of more challenging books available as well.
The first issue was one I had some sympathy with. The person they met had the feeling that there were so many new books that it was a struggle to keep up with all you wanted to read, and that because of that they would rather read a new book than re-read an old one. The answer was to do more re-reading, but the author didn't go into any depth about the issue, so wasn't really much help. Should I perhaps have re-read another book instead of reading The Cat Who Saved Books?