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I've heard this before somewhere...
People don't listen to the radio like the did in the 20s, people don't go to the movies like they did in the 40s, and people don't watch TV like they did in the 60s. We've also heard that people don't play video games like they used to. People don't play role-playing games like they used to. Yet somehow, all these industries have survived.
The problem is not that the publishers think they can dictate what we will read to us, the problem is that they have no idea what we will read and are unwilling to take risks. Especially in the fiction market, the worst traits of the film industry have been adopted: everyone is chasing after the big score, want to establish brand-name franchises, and nobody is willing to take any risk to accomplish that. Thus we have hundreds of cookie-cutter books that are almost exactly the same.
I also don't think extended copyright terms have anything to do with this. It is simply a lemming mentality among book publishers, nothing more.
One other thing I think is going on is that books are increasingly being sold to a smaller, more hardcore market and is freezing out casual readers. A casual reader is not going to dive into a 700 page monstrosity that is book one of a series with 6 volumes and hasn't ended yet. But walk through the fiction section and you'll see more and more of that.
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