There's never been much love lost between literature and the marketplace. The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it's an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
12 November 2013
Literature and the Marketplace
Jonathan Franzen, "Why Bother?", How to Be Alone (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2002), pp. 64-65: