I first became aware of these sorts of books through airport bookstores. There is a rack of bestsellers in each one that I have been to (I don't fly often). Eas

I first became aware of these sorts of books through airport bookstores. There is a rack of bestsellers in each one that I have been to (I don't fly often). Easy reads, many of them written by reporters and a well fitting impulse buy for people who may have nothing to do but sit and wait for hours. As the sales ratchet up, Amazon will do the same as these bookstores. Premium eyeball space gets allocated to these books. The books may or may not be junk. Your assessment of them is based on other objects which share certain characteristics. The books you feel are high quality share the characteristics of "book" but that doesn't mean they are in the same category to be judged together. If these books were instead called "magazines" (which have similar characteristics) then we wouldn't be comparing them to the higher quality books. The internet enabled Amazon and it has also supercharged my ability to do further research to distinguish between good books and trash. I also prefer buying things shipped from out of sight warehouses rather than chains of big box stores. Has Amazon really changed anything? Of every output from this world, probably most things are junk and a small percentage is valuable. The things I create is probably the same. Only rarely do I come up with something amazing. Note: we probably have to restrict this to idea space. The Iphone represents a huge ball of outputs from the army of people who are involved in creating them, but the idea space which created the Iphone was probably a drop in the ocean of bad ideas.