I'm going to take a stab at this, but it's purely my opinion. First, novels are generally solo ventures. Sometimes there are two people. So there's no corollar

I'm going to take a stab at this, but it's purely my opinion. First, novels are generally solo ventures. Sometimes there are two people. So there's no corollary of novels written by hundreds of people in collaboration. Second, novels are strictly in the art category. We're used to thinking of solo artists. Even in fields like filmmaking, which require massive amounts of collaboration, we still view it as an art form and gravitate to the "author", i.e. usually the director. By contrast, software isn't commonly seen as an art form. There are aspects of art to it, but a lot of it is more like engineering and problem solving. We're used to thinking of teams coming together to solve problems. Third, no one thinks they're going to strike it rich writing a novel. The odds are almost like winning the lottery. So we instinctively understand that writing a novel has some value outside of the revenue it might generate for the author. By contrast, the popular story about developing apps is that the only reason to do so is to strike it rich. We don't commonly see the writing of apps as inherently valuable in it of itself. We tend to think if it doesn't make you a millionaire, it was a waste of time. On the flip-side, since many people can't conceive of why you would develop an app unless it's to get rich, they can derisively view the whole effort as a get-rich-quick scheme. To be clear, I'm not saying these viewpoints are correct, simply that they exist and are common.