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Originally Posted by Difflugia
It's also possible that you're comparing a selected sample of old SF with everything available now. I can think of a number of authors from the 50s and 60s that I like better than most of the modern stuff, but I can also think of modern authors that I like better than most of the old stuff.
I think the biggest factor is that there's just a lot of dreck out there, but the old stuff has had time to be filtered. The good stuff get saved, passed around and reprinted, while the crap gets discarded.
When I hit Amazon's list of SF, going through the stuff that's free and 99 cents feels like flipping through issues of Analog looking for a gem. When I went through the Baen CDs, I think there was something in the neighborhood of two hundred books and I only found about a dozen representing four or five authors that I really liked.
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You and fjtorres both have some good points I think Difflugia. Of course growing up in the 70's and 80's most of the SF I read was via the public library (i.e. in book form) rather than being the new hot off the presses magazine fiction like in Asimov's SF or Analog SF. Or the were old paperbacks that were up for grabs at garage sales. So either way they had stood the test of time be being worth the publisher's time and expense to republish after their initial magazine appearances.