I think the best (fictional) literature in the 21st century will be published online on personal websites. It may be that no one will read it. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. But the publishing industry now is either a) unsustainable or b) has completely different goals that it used to.

There was a hubski thread a year or so ago where we tried to name the greatest living American author. It's not like we drew a blank -- McCarthy, Pynchon, Salinger was still alive at that point, etc -- but there wasn't a clear answer carrying the torch. Steinbeck books were events.

Consensus literature is no longer also (necessarily) the best literature, which makes it very very difficult to gauge the state of the art. The "problem" with the publishing industry that it's a profit-driven machine and while the books that get published are often quite bad they make money so there is no incentive for publishers to try harder. Remember Rowling's experiment. Talent will not out. And since that's the case people like you and me have to go the extra mile to find our reading material elsewhere. Hence (hopefully) the rise of self-publishing online, serialization on blogs (this and this are two of the best things I'm reading right now), etc.

a case study you know of about your publishing industry remark?

I feel like I read an Atlantic/New Yorker piece about this in the last year but... And we've discussed this on hubski before (since we've got several published/self-published/aspiring authors). I'll keep an eye out.