My point was that great literature doesn't need the involvement of 90% of the population to exist. If 90% of the people stop reading books "deeply" (and that's

My point was that great literature doesn't need the involvement of 90% of the population to exist. If 90% of the people stop reading books "deeply" (and that's assuming they ever did), we still get to have Tolstoys of our day for the people who want to spend their time that way. This is no loss for humanity. You picked "reading books" as your metric of progress, but that choice needs to be justified. If, instead, you picked "watching programmed television", you could be similarly concerned as more people are cutting cable, but fewer people would take this argument seriously.