Crime and Punishment, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Lord of the Rings, 1984, The Great Gatsby, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Odyssey (by Homer) are all books that I enjoyed that are varying degrees of old. I think comparing old vs new books is fundamentally different from old vs new movies. Let’s bring in another form of media since you brought up books: what about video games? Most gamers have some cutoff before which they either generally don’t play games older than that or they do but wouldn’t call any of them “greatest of all time.” This is not a deliberate decision, but a product of revealed preference. Even then, newest doesn’t mean good.

I think Morrowind, Ocarina of Time, and FF7 are GOATed, but I also don’t go out of my way to play older 2D games and certainly would never call them the greatest. On top of that, I have to admit that the games I mentioned are less enjoyable today than they were back then, and are on the same level as other 10/10s that I played in more recent times.

The medium by which books are conveyed hasn’t really changed meaningfully (holding fixed what is being written about). They’re still words. That’s not true of movies and video games.