Knowledge used to be reserved for the elite, locked behind closed doors that the majority never knew existed.

Then the printing press came along. Knowledge was commoditized, no longer reserved for those born into families of status. Society changed, and I’d like to think for the better. We began to see innovation like never before.

This evolution was not without burden. Knowledge can be irksome at times—after all, it requires a certain degree of mental exertion to process. Fortunately, the means to publish knowledge remained somewhat exclusive; one need not look further than a book store for an authority on any subject. If it’s in print, it’s trustworthy.

Then the internet came along and commoditized that, too. Now, we’re forced to analyze all information presented to us should we seek the truth. How do we tell what’s trustworthy? Why must we expend such effort to sort fact from fiction?

I see this as a natural progression, given our history as a society. We’ll adapt, and we’ll be better for it.

On the other hand, I’m some random person typing into the digital abyss while lying in bed. Am I a subject matter expert, or am I a 13-year-old who’s presently failing History? You’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of it: you’re stuck judging my statements without the context of authority or a librarian’s recommendation.

Nothing has changed here. You should always be questioning what you read. Open an encyclopedia from a few decades ago; you’re quite likely to find numerous mistakes on each page.

Ah, but you don’t want to waste time reading something that never even tried to be correct, right? Well, that’s a problem we haven’t solved yet: give everyone a voice, and all you hear is noise. Maybe some young, enterprising VC will sort that out for us, but exclusivity isn’t the solution.

And still, in reality, in an economy like our, that's what you get.

I don't believe that's difficult. You can almost always differentiate real books from the grift-type ebooks by looking at them by publisher. Big difference between serious non-fiction publishers and print on demand titles.

Because of the 'business' described above, that book is now impossible to find. It's been swamped by hundreds of easily generated titles which are at best copy pasted from the wikipedia, at worst utter gibberish.

I'm not quite in my 30s yet but "published" in general vs "published by a specific publisher" (like O'rielly) seems really odd, especially after some of the absolute garbage we were forced to buy in college.

An expert ghostwriter would be undercut by a ghostwriter supplying copy-pasted material just good enough to get past the publisher. A publisher who actually cares about whether or not the book is worthless would outbid this publisher for the skills of the expert.