The reality of the matter is that the ungodly amount of offer reduces book value to a very low level. Between books published in the last 200 years and the humongous amounts published every week, there is just too much choice to justify spending significant sums on individual books.

I suspect the answer will be a switch to "open publishing", with authors and editors collaborating via websites like on OSS programs and then monetizing on "stores", hence keeping costs so low that they can work on economies of scale.