OK, I get that you object to the blogger "surfacing" this book at all. More generally, though, a lot of people pay attention to value cues like the simple fact

OK, I get that you object to the blogger "surfacing" this book at all. More generally, though, a lot of people pay attention to value cues like the simple fact that something has been professionally published. With books, I'm sure you would agree that there are multiple filters that people apply. The general availability of a book attests to the fact that it passed some kind of quality control, however feeble. The general condition when it comes to reviewing is that the products are out there anyway, so both positive and negative reviews are appropriate. The tradition of literary book reviews (e.g. the NYRB, LRB) is to turn the review into an timely essay, maybe cover a few recent releases, express an opinion, pass on the most interesting facts etc. The point is to make the review a self-contained literary work, capable of being read for its own sake, for information or for pleasure. I think that's what this blog post does, it takes something curious and makes an entertaining story out of it. You might think that this isn't "worth other people's time", in the sense that it doesn't advance an alternative, more relevant approach to covering the book's subject matter. But the review is potentially worth their time if it sheds light on anything (academic eccentricity, the importance of typesetting in scholarly work, anxieties about systemic racism in 21st C academic writing, etc.) There's another discussion to be had about fields where negative reviews are rare, like visual art. In that case, publishing any review at all does serve to draw attention to/advertise/"surface" the artwork in question. Critics aren't really able to distance themselves from the world of artists and curators, so they can't really say anything too negative. But that's a bit of a digression. The book might not be worth people's time as a CS text. That doesn't mean the blog post isn't worth their time as a reflection on other phenomena. Underwood Dudley wrote multiple books about mathematical cranks. Cranks get a bad press for wasting mathematicians' time and being impossible to convince of the errors in their work. But isn't the phenomenon of crank culture interesting, and couldn't it potentially teach us something about human nature?