p.s.
Look at a book like Blood Meridian. A brilliant book written by a guy who will probably win the Nobel Prize one day. McCarthy has probably sold fewer books in his entire career than folks who paid to see Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
What does Cormac McCarthy’s lack of success have to do with anything. The fact that he, called by some one of America’s most pretentious authors, isn’t writing for the every man has absolutely NOTHING to do with your original false statement that books are a luxury, nor does it have any to do with your statement that modern general fiction is geared towards an urban audience. McCarthy’s stuff might be geared towards that audience, but his lack of success shows he’s not part of the norm. You want books geared towards the everyman read Elmore Leonard, nice popcorn books about stupid people, and they sell well too.
His book “The Road” is on the Oprah’s Book Club List so that means more of the general public will read that book and then usually that leads them to check out his other books. So he’s going to do just fine now that Oprah has said it’s a good read.
There’s another real issue that is problematic and that is reading uses a different part of the brain than watching tv or a movie. The written word stimulates linear reasoning on the left side of the brain, images are processed on the right side of the brain- the feeling side.