I couldn't agree more
Rim, although the situation might even be worse than you are allowing it to be:
books = Movie units
There isn't an author writing today who doesn't have, at least somewhere at the back of his/her mind, the idea of movie rights to the book, and thus creates accordingly. If there are authors who avoid this, I would suggest that they instead follow one of the following two other equations:
books = Oprah units
or
books = Man Booker Prize units
I wonder though if there really is no room for an effective presence of the author in this however. If books-as-units were widgets, then anyone could be trained to write the kinds of books that different people want to read. But we can all agree that there is still some kind of speical non-quantifiable talent behind good writing, such that the people who produce book-units in response to a market demand, still do so from within a 'talent' or skill-set that is uniquely their own.
It's like any profession -- every computer programmer is still an individual using his or her creativity. While the lines of code written by that programmer might not have an overt or visible effect upon the whole, there is an effect which, when combined with the other creative/individual effects of other programmers, results in large-scale change.
So art is independent of the artist, and perhaps controlled by the publishing houses, but the culumative effect of creative artists moves the people (since publishers are people too!
) in certain directions?
Grasping for hope here. . .which is hard for a dyed in the wool Althusserian such as myself (free biscuits for anyone who knows what that means).