Chatter, that's interesting. There is a noticeable difference between novels written a century ago and novels written today. Today's novels need to have some sort of action at the very beginning of the story in order to grab the reader's attention. The older ones tend to spend more time outlining the characters and scene before the action starts up. They may be excellent stories, but many people lack the attention span needed to keep reading until the story gets under way. Maybe what you're talking about has a lot to do with the relatively small number of people who read older works or classic books.
I wish I knew what we could do to reverse this situation. Every time somebody tries to raise their standards somebody somewhere manages to keep it from happening.
