[nochiel]

> They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost.

I'm not certain that books ever competed on quality. A cursory glance at the NY Times best-seller list of the past few years seems to indicate that quality isn't a [major] factor. Unless you somehow consider Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, Twilight, and so on, to somehow be the paragon of quality literature.

[larrik]

You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read." They aren't the same (though they may overlap).

The Da Vinci Code keeps a frenetic pace that makes "quality" secondary, and quite difficult to achieve. (I would submit that The Bourne Supremacy is superior in both pacing and quality, however).

Harry Potter is insanely accessible and easy to read, and has a very surprising amount of internal consistency, even over 7 books (which is in stark contrast to most mainstream sci-fi/fantasy series).

As for Twilight, I don't know what makes a book appeal to that demographic, but it seems pretty different than any area I've dabbled in as a reader.

(I worry that giving opinions like these opens me up for some interesting flaming, but whatever.

[nochiel]

> You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read."

I'm not confusing anything. The comment I responded to stated that "books have become commodities. They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost."

Assume it is true, as insinuated, that books did compete on quality, then the result of winning that competition is a given book becoming widely read (in other words "books people like to read"). I submitted that line of thinking has a false premise.

That's all I was responding to. No confusion whatsoever.