/lit/ - Literature

>>10649518
the audience changed.
people dont read because they want to they read,they read because theyre told to read a specific thing through marketing or other means.
there was an article some time ago about how purchasing trends with books changed.
for example books used to sell well over a long period of time sort of like how pc games tend sell consistently. now its however about how many books you can sell on release. and then move on to the next big thing. i can give you a video game example of this. take the xcom remake.
the first game was made multiplatform. it sold really really shit on consoles but decently on pc initially. sales kept on going though. and through no small part of the long war mod the game conistently sold well over 4 years rather than just a bunch in the first release weak that the game waranted a sequel. and hiring of the group that made the mod by the actual developers to make a bunch of official free mods for xcom 2.
this little example is supposed to show you how the demographic changed over time.
this really only applies to the "big" book publishers and writers. i also seem to remember a certain academic paper doing research about this over the timespan of 10 years by checking barns& noble sales in the us, waterstones sales in the uk and hugendubel sales in germany which all resulted in similar changes of trends specifically in sci-fi and fantasy. i think this was an MIT paper but im not entirely sure. i remember gettiing it from sci-hub though.

tl;dr:
less people read books consistently nowadays even if they are easier to obtain. thus many books are now formulaic to appeal to a large demographic that is easy to market to and so profit can be calculated and projected before it is even sold.