I'm not talking about a reader browsing some books and picking one based on the publisher's mark. I never really do that myself either. The "validation" I'm r

I'm not talking about a reader browsing some books and picking one based on the publisher's mark. I never really do that myself either. The "validation" I'm referring to is much more subtle: the mere fact that a book is in print and in a major bookstore--i.e. it has been picked up by a publisher--IS that validation. Because anyone can now publish themselves to the Amazon book store, that implicit validation will now become explicit as readers who start picking up indie authors realize they need someone to sort through the dreck for them. And again, I'm not just talking about a bad book--because you can get those from major publishers too--I'm talking about a certain standard of quality. Even bad books are usually typo-free, reasonably typeset, and so on. With self-published authors flooding the market, there will soon be (or already is!) a new bottom-rung of bad quality that previously didn't exist, because it was a publisher's job to weed out or fix such books. Up until today, all of us have unknowingly and implicitly been relying on the publisher's validation when buying 95% of books at a store, because without that validation they wouldn't BE in the store. That's what I'm talking about.