> You have got it backwards. Why would economic incentives opportunities not exist if there were still demand?

Novels can take years to write, and sometimes years to sell. In the meantime, authors need to pay the bills. Only authors who are already famous get substantial advances for unwritten books. Therefore, aspiring novelists need sources of income to support themselves while they write a novel. Magazine writing and academia have been two of the most common sources of income for aspiring novelists. If those sources dry up, then the supply of aspiring novelists dries up too, and thus the supply of novels. Even if there's a demand for novels, publishers have little idea who will write a great novel before that novel is actually written; publishers can't just throw around money to support a bunch of unproven writers.

> If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet - wouldn’t internet then be the real cause of decline and not some vague reason about wages?

Ironically, "because of internet" is the vaguest of reasons. Here's what the submitted article said, specifically: "the internet killed magazines, not because people’s brains turned to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue. U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn’t rely primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still profitable."