@Mary-Anna said:
Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction
I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.
I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.
Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.
My husband loves short stories but they’ve never been my favourite. However, some of my most memorable reading experiences have been short stories by Stephen King. In fact, I absolutely loved when he published The Green Mile originally. It was in “chapbook” form, inspired by Charles Dickens. They were released one a month, IIRC, and I looked forward to each one.
As much as I loved that experience and others I have had with short story collections, as MaryAnna said, I generally don’t get short story collections even when written by authors I love. Short stories do seem to fall into two camps (at least from what I’ve noticed). Highly literary authors (Margaret Atwood, for example, has a number of books that are her collected short stories), and genre authors. Sci fi and fantasy collections of short stories are published all the time, and I actually will read the stories by my favourite authors! But I don’t know why I am less inclined to do so with, for example, realistic fiction.