Well, 4-5 decades ago ago he was for US mainstream literature world what Led Zeppelin were for 70s hard rock fans...
So, the essay author explains very well why he asked the question: to show the very short span of literary glory, from someone who was ubiquitous and celebrated not long ago.
He also adds, when 2 out of 300 raise a hand: "Frankly I was surprised it was that many".
Half a century or so ago, and for a long time before that, people didn't just chose from "thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world" -- they knew the authors of their time, and the times before, with many overlaps that formed a canon, not a free choice among thousands of works (if that, since many don't read that much, period).
>The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one?
Does it matter? Both are comparatively recent -- there are people alive in the US who were born when none of them (radio, tv) were available at any home.
TV is also shallowly based on technical quality (people wont see black and white shows etc), whereas the written word on paper is a stable technology for centuries, if not millennia.
Arguably that's less the case than it used to be insofar as you can get your hands on many older TV shows if you want to.
That said, TV--and, especially, historic network TV--is a lot more rooted in its time and place than a lot of writing is. It's partly for technical reasons as you say. The production values of a lot of older shows are going to be a distraction even if the content were otherwise modern. But TV shows also tend to reflect (to an arguably greater degree than the typical film) the period in which they were made. Not just the look but a lot of the sensibilities.
I'd wager than there are very few TV shows dating to the 1970s and before that are really watchable today whereas there are plenty of films going back to almost the beginning of "talkies." (There are some good silent films too but obviously those have to be approached with a somewhat different mindset.)
There are some exceptions. For example, episodes of The Twilight Zone or a series like MAS*H can still be appreciated, but for the most part, no. (ADDED: For example, All in the Family was a groundbreaking show when it aired. But, although I haven't seen an episode in years, I'm willing to bet it would come across as very much a period piece today.)
One, books are no less a voguish medium than television or films; it's not just a coincidence that a bunch of people read Mailer at the same time, or that the best-seller list is mostly books that have gotten a lot of buzz recently, rather than timeless literary classics. Additionally, older books can be difficult to new audiences because of style (consider ancient books' long lists of genealogies, or their elliptical style, or consider the long-windedness of 19th-Century writing -- both can put readers off).
Further, the popularity of TV or movies is not solely determined by technical quality. Fewer people are watching shows that are a few years old now, or people are rediscovering 90s TV because it's added to Netflix and has a second wind. Consider also music. There's little technical reason to choose between Carrie Underwood or Loretta Lynn; both are easily available in high-fidelity digital format. Yet more people choose to listen to one than the other.
Books and tv series or movies have totally different tails of sales vs recentness.
Movies are mostly front-loaded (more recent = more views), tv series are almost totally front-loaded (some might watch 10 or 20 year old series, but not many will watch a 40 or 50 year old one, whereas for movies people do it more often).
Books, of course, are far more unrelated with recentness. There are books that are well read even today that are out of millennia, and anybody who considers themselves a literature reader has read works from the 20th and 19th century, and many from earlier times too.
Some other things that strike me: I agree that a phone or iPad isn't much good for reading a novel, but I love reading on my Kindle (and the built-in dictionary makes it easier to approach foreign-language works, although I still don't do this as often as I feel I ought to).
The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one?
The distraction of always-on Internet is certainly real, though, and exacerbated by smartphones. And it is striking that even journalists and political leaders often don't seem very well-read, particularly when you go back and look at 19th-Century rhetoric rife with allusions to the Bible or Greek myth that are opaque to much of the modern audience.