I agree with everything you say -- and I'd like to add that the reasons people who buy things treat books like commodities, is because publishers do. Everybody

I agree with everything you say -- and I'd like to add that the reasons people who buy things treat books like commodities, is because publishers do. Everybody's heard about that practice where unsold books have their covers ripped off, & are just thrown away. The publishers handily put a notice about that in the front of the book. If that doesn't make something a commodity, what does? On top of everything else, everybody with a Kindle who's bought more than a couple books has noticed that over 30% of them have horrible, amateurish formatting & OCR/character replacement errors. And on top of that, at least in the tech/nonfiction industry, publishers have drastically cut back resources & services offered to authors. O'Reilly, for example, wasn't planning on paying anyone to tech edit my book. They were hoping for volunteers, at a chapter apiece, instead of one person with a consistent viewpoint thru-out. That screws authors and it screws readers even more. As a person who did paid tech editing work for Que, Sams, McGraw-Hill & other publishers I can't even remember, I found this ludicrous. (And those publishers regularly told me I did the best work they ever had, which is saying something. Furthermore, I know most of my changes were never incorporated, probably because they "took too much time.") Basically, publishers are shitting where they eat & are too stupid to realize it, or too terrified to admit it, and instead, they are crowing about how the "consumer" is stupid, horrible, no good, very bad, and just damned stubborn.