Read any good books lately? I’m going to take a wild guess and say you probably haven’t. It would be a stretch to call anything you’re reading for physiology “good.” And you probably can’t remember the last time you read a book in your free time. Or maybe, like some of our generation, you’ve never even read a book that wasn’t required for a class at school.

It’s possible we have come to a time in this country when our attention spans are simply too short for recreational reading. Why read a book when you can get drunk and watch “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fianc‚”?

Aside from our collective laziness, another possible culprit for our lacking desire to read is the cost of books. There are correlations between the film industry and the publishing industry. Are you going to risk $7.50 on an independent film you’ve never heard of, or go for the guaranteed run-of-the-mill laughs from the celebrity you know and love? The same goes for novels. If a new paperback costs more than $10, and you certainly can’t judge a book by its cover, you’re more likely to go with the big name authors you know will give you the CIA conspiracy plots you’re thirsting for. Other less mainstream, less mass-marketed novels and works get lost in the margins and drift out of publication because nobody wants to risk $10 on an author they don’t know.

But what if the book in question was, say, five dollars? Or three dollars? Substantially dropping the price would make novels much more of an impulse purchase. Taking the economic “risk” out of purchasing more new books would make it easier for young people to pick up a new book to read for recreation. Unfortunately, few people have the power to make such drastic changes in the publishing industry.

People are taking action, however, and they certainly didn’t intend to make reading more readily accessible to the public. At least not at first; they were only trying to make it easier on themselves as first-time teachers.

Back in 1990 at Carnegie Mellon University, a group of graduate students used the current networking technology to make a database where they could share syllabi and course writings.

Slowly, that database grew to include writings and articles the various members found interesting. When the Internet became mainstream around 1993, the database was called eserver.org.

By the mid-1990s the server had come to include hundreds of writers and editors. Today, the eserver is one of the largest free databases of texts available to the public.

Thanks to the involvement of Geoffrey Sauer, founding member of eserver.org and current ISU English professor, the server is now based right here on campus.

Eserver, for “the English server,” now boasts more than 40 directories from such topics as drama and poetry to Marxist theory editorials, music and essays about technical communication. The server has steady traffic and is continually added and updated with new writings, articles, links and even entire books all free of charge. The server provides free access to all of the works on its database without nagging pop-ups or advertisements, and is run entirely by volunteers. You can browse opinion articles online or can have some of your own writing published. By providing free access to hundreds of writings, the eserver is changing the economics and politics of publishing.

Unlike the first Napster or other failed share programs of the 1990s, the eserver is completely legal and will always be 100 percent free. While providing an online community for writers and readers, the people who continue to expand the eserver have taken the first step in getting America to read by providing free available texts.

The eserver is a welcome change from an industry that has become obsessed with sales and less concerned with readership. In fact, the beauty of the server is that it will always be changing as the contributions to the database change. Anyone can become a part of the server, and it grows more and more each day.

This is what the Internet was meant to do — provide accessible information and communities without commitment.

So the next time a self-appointed moral authority begins speaking down his or her nose about the collective apathy of this generation when it comes to reading, prove him or her wrong and do something totally radical, like reading a book that doesn’t have raised lettering on the cover.