Ultimately, though, a bad link, a bad blog post, is just that. You can slough it off. You don’t NEED the same level of legitimacy and social signals, if only because the body of writing, and the time required, is so much smaller. Ditto a YouTube video or MP3 vs. a feature film or full-length album. It’s one reason why podcasts are tricky, because the things are so danged long.

And, blogs, videos, MP3s are all free.

A book has all sorts of ways to signal that it deserves your attention. But that’s because it NEEDS more of it. The digital world, those legitimation mechanisms are just as social, but a little more porous, but that’s okay. After all, they’re not asking for so much.

In a way, the fact that half of the work involved in book production isn’t done by the writer makes it even more of a signal of social value. It’s not just the effort implied, but the fact that other people, many of them experts on what makes a book good, have found the book worthy of their additional effort.

Few books are as de luxe as those made by vanity presses. I mean, if I give my own self-published, self-written book a fancy cover and acid-free paper, and embed gold into the leather, who cares? I’m probably biased to think that what I’ve written is worth the effort. But if independent craftsmen and publishers and editors put in that work, putting their own reputations on the line, then a reader can feel pretty confident that they might be about to read something good — right?