Not only are more people buying more books than ever before, but they're reading them later in life.
A part of that, I think, is that it's now socially acceptable to wear corrective lenses in public. (Speaking of movies, you know those movies from the forties and fifties -- "Miss Smithers! Without your glasses you're ... beautiful!") That was the social situation where wearing glasses was, all by itself, enough of a disguise for Clark Kent. Real men didn't wear glasses.
Now not only isn't there a social stigma on glasses, there are really good contact lenses, and laser surgery.
Booksales are going up every year.
Now this is both good and bad. Call it the Mustard Problem.
Used to be if you went to the store for mustard, you had French's yellow mustard and, if you had a big store in a big city, Gulden's brown mustard.
They sold a lot of mustard, Gulden's and French's, between the two of them.
Now ... you go into a grocery store and there's four shelves of mustards. You have your Gulden's and your French's still, and you have your Grey Poupon, and you have your State of Maine Sea Salt Mustard, and your Beer Mustard, and your Whole Seed Garlic Mustard, and your Creamy Dill Mustard ... and a lot more mustards beside.
More people are buying more mustard ... but no individual mustard is selling particularly well. The whole pie is divided by more slices.
Used to be you came out with a paperback original and if it sold less thanl 100,000 copies you'd wonder what was wrong. Nowadays, you come out with the same paperback original and if it sells 20,000 copies you're happy.
Royalty rates are still about the same, but the royalties are on a $8.00 paperback rather than on a $0.35 paperback, so the money is about the same overall. But in 1960 you could buy a house for $20,000, and now you can't. Bigger pie, smaller slices. Same problem as the mustard makers have.
This is a good thing for the readers, though, just like more choices are good for mustard users.
More different books published means more chances for quirky, original works to get published and distributed. This is a good thing.
And this is all oversimplified, but that's another picture of writing.