>Because book quality has nothing to do with release date.
Quality has a lot to do with release date, although in the opposite direction you seem to imply here. Books that have been part of the discourse for hundreds or thousands of years are likely of significant value because they have been hammered at, turned upside-down and kept people engaged for a very long time. That's a pretty good indicator for their value, and it also increases the chance that the books are still going to be relevant in another 50 years.
So cultural artifacts are actually like reverse-fruit. The older they are, the likely they have struck a nerve and found something that's meaningful regardless of what age we happen to find ourselves in. If you have to choose between a classic and a random politician's campaign memoir published half a year ago, picking the former based on age is actually a really good idea.
You're just repeating his point, but introduced unnecessary confusion.
The book quality has nothing to do with the release date itself. There's probably plenty of bad old books. The value is in the filtering that occurred and made those books disappear.
This is captured in the concept of the “Lindy Effect”, which says the future life expectancy of something like a book is proportional to its current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.
In other words NYT’s 2021 best seller list is less likely to be read in 2030 than a classic.
Quality has a lot to do with release date, although in the opposite direction you seem to imply here. Books that have been part of the discourse for hundreds or thousands of years are likely of significant value because they have been hammered at, turned upside-down and kept people engaged for a very long time. That's a pretty good indicator for their value, and it also increases the chance that the books are still going to be relevant in another 50 years.
So cultural artifacts are actually like reverse-fruit. The older they are, the likely they have struck a nerve and found something that's meaningful regardless of what age we happen to find ourselves in. If you have to choose between a classic and a random politician's campaign memoir published half a year ago, picking the former based on age is actually a really good idea.