Is it fair to simply ignore the long term? It'd be kind of strange to hear advice that bonds are the best investment around 'because stocks aren't paying you anything right now'.

I'm only ignoring the long term because I'm looking for evidence that the rate at which the market produces new, timely works is reasonably close to what the demand for such works is.

Would you really? In your life, there has surely been a year or two where quality of production has dropped (art isn't so reliable & consistent as to only improve every year); did you shift your reading habits?

My fiction reading habits have very little to do with timeliness concerns. I read new fiction when an author I like produces it. Otherwise my reading is focused on genre books (science fiction like everyone else here) and classics. The only temporal criteria in my reading involves preferring books written recently enough that the style isn't so dated it slows me down. There are some occasions for preferring timely topics, for sure. But the frame for timely in these cases tends to be about 5-10 years so my reading habits won't actually vary from year to year. I don't even have enough information about books to even make good selections until end-of-the year lists come out. And that is part of the problem. There is very little information around that lets one compare books (and music and movies) in any systematic way except in relation to other works that came out that year. Once in a while there is an instant classic but it is had to know what the choice works of year are until a couple years later.

In short, reading habits don't correspond to quality of output by year b/c 1) I lack the information to adjust habits accordingly and 2) the time frame for recent is quite a bit more than a year so there is no need to adjust habits accordingly.