> A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.

> Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.

I think you're overstating things. Some extracts from the introduction of https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ :

> Whereas only dozens of biji have survived from earlier periods, extant Song [10th-13th centuries, predating Marco Polo] works number in the hundreds. This development can be attributed to three major factors: the expansion of the publishing industry, the growing size of the scholar-official class, and the rising level of literacy among the Song population. Combines, these trends led to the wide circulation of printed materials in general, and the increase in biji authors and popularity of anecdotal writing in particular.

> it was a common practice among Song biji authors to state in the prefaces for their works that their biji were the result of years of casual record keeping of items gathered at social occasions or acquired through personal investigation. As a result, a typical biji would touch on various topics, ranging from observations about natural conditions to everyday life of the elite and ordinary people, and from local practices and customs to interesting personalities and strange and unusual occurrences.

> The sizes of biji collections, for example, varied greatly. Some contained only a few dozen short entries. Others included lengthier episodes and amounted to hundreds of chapters. Equally diverse were the backgrounds of biji authors. While towering scholarly and literary figures [such as... ] composed biji, the majority of biji authors achieved neither high office nor literary fame. Their biji collections were often their only surviving works, bearing witness to these men's varied geographic and familial origins, travels, social connections, scholarly and artistic inclinations, and everyday concerns, such as personal hobbies, career aspirations, and obsessions.

> Even though both Casual Notes and the Record [夷坚志] are classified as biji works, Hong Mai apparently meant for them to differ in their content and purpose. Compared to the Casual Notes' attention to the institutional, literary, and historical developments of the Song and earlier times, the majority of the Record stories were gathered through conversations and hearsay. If Casual Notes was more scholarly in nature and intended to demonstrate Hong's erudition in the classics, literature, and history and politics, the Record was a declaration of the author's love of the strange, the marvelous, and the supernatural

> The Record achieved an immediate success. In multiple prefaces, Hong Mai referred to its popularity and the pressure he was under to produce additional chapters in increasingly shorter intervals.

> At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it is not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country.

This describes a rather robust publishing industry that was happy to create blocks for the minor memoirs of people of no particular note, and that published works that achieved actual popularity in every conceivable price point, cutting new blocks specifically for the cheaper editions! And all this is against a cultural background in which reading -- the skill and the activity -- is much more difficult than it ever was in Europe.

Meanwhile -- OK, several hundred years prior -- novels were produced for the popular market in the Hellenic world. Those were not printed and could not have been as cheap, but they were a popular consumption good, not something out of reach.

You see Don Quixote hailed as the first novel (granted, this happens less than it used to), but that reputation is based only on a gross unawareness of history.