It's a real shame and symptomatic of where we are headed culturally. A recent visit to a large bookstore chain proved a depressing experience. Their entire stock of technical books comprised one single vertical column of shelves about 2.5 feet wide. OTOH, the shelving for books on celebrity biographies took up about one-third of the whole store. You mentioned "people only buy novels" but I'd bet a pound to a penny they mostly buy modern trashy fiction. Probably some crappy thriller ghost-written by a pulp author and badged as written by some glamor model or soap star. The literary novel is either dead or totally out of fashion. But probably dead.