So, people enjoying a book is not an indication of whether it's good and universal appeal has no relationship to quality?
And as the number of rocks increase, I will have more rocks. That's just a reflexive statement.
We have close to 100% literacy in the western world. This means more books, and more writers, not better books. The average person still only reads at the high school level. I think that you will find that college educated adults read much the same thing, unless they are in an English department. My friend with a masters degree in Psychology, besides reading advanced psychological texts, reads comic books and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. One of my lawyer friends reads nothing but pulp science fiction novels, and another one with a Ph. D. in Physics owns the complete collection of Dragonlance. When you raise an individuals level of education, they tend to read at a higher level within their own field.
Last I checked, human physiology hasn't changed in 100,000 years and certain standards are universal. There are a very small range of stimulae which men are hard wired to find pleasurable. They don't change. If you want to change what people like, then build yourself a better human. Biologically, we are about as smart as we ever were, which is why Shakespeare and Homer remain unsurpassed after centuries. They represent the high water mark of human literary achievement, the very best we are capable of in this field. You can't run a one minute mile, you can't hold your breathe for ten minutes, and you can't write better than Shakespeare. We have the advantage of the ancients, in that we can read the ancients, but that knowledge does not help us to write better books than them. Shakespeare, like Hemingway, didn't even have a college education; so your statement that education is the key to a better literature is demonstrably innaccurate. The sciences show progression, but not so much the humanities. When you educate somebody in a field like history, what you get is better informed people making the same mistakes.
But that's unfair of me. You weren't talking about writers. You were refering to readers, to which I reply that King Lear and The Odyssey were big favorites among the illiterate unwashed masses of their times. Likewise, people read trashy romance novels, and pulp fantasy about pirates and magical schoolboys back when literacy was only 10%. We don't tend to preserve those works. But if you look back in history they probably comprised a comparable share of the literary marketplace to what they hold in todays day and age. The uneducated tend to know a good thing when they see it too. Let's do them some justice. You don't have to be well educated to appreciate high art, and Michaelangelo's Pieta effects everybody whether they can define it's effect or not. I can't tell you why I like Verdi's music because I'm not a trained music scholar, but I know what I like. What I am, rather clumsily, trying to say is that people's tastes don't tend to change that much, which is one of the reasons why great art endures.
Let's say that you make advanced education compulsory and every person on the planet gets the equivalent of a B.A. education in English. I think what you will find is that you get a greater variety of well made literature. You'll get a rise in the quality of comicbooks, action movies, science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers. It will be a renaissance for literature as a whole, but the increase in the number of readers and writers of the kind of literature which you enjoy will be marginal. Joyce appeals to a very small minority of the global community, and the type of people who like him are the types of personalities already drawn to English departments. In political terms, that's your base. In marketing terms, that's your target market.
Let's stick with the marketing terminology for the nonce. Have you ever heard of the concept "diminished returns"? I want to sell potato chips; so I buy $100 million in advertisements. My sales go up 10%. I spend another $100 million and I get a 3% increase in sales. After a while, there comes a point when you've saturated your market, and every person who is willing to buy potato chips is buying your potato chips, and you won't sell another bag no matter how much money you spend or how much advertising you buy. There are just some people who don't like potato chips. That is why the audience share for elitist art does not increase at the same rate as a dramatic increase in the level of education. If you double the number of people reading, you can double the number of people already reading Ulysses, but the percentage of readers reading Ulysses stays the same. If you raise the quality of their literary education you might pick up a few, but it's never going to be anything like 100%. You're never going to make Ulysses a best seller. Sorry.
It's more like saying that in the field of natural selection certain survival characteristics are favored over others and that adaptations which do not lend animals an advantage both to breed and live longer do not pass on their genes, become recessive traits, and die out. I'm not trying to kill 'em. I'm just pointing out where they've hurt their chances.
That's me. Silly old terror.