> (again, if you're not choose complete trash).
So you're not really dismissing parent's point that books aren't inherently good, and many will be half mass produced trash.
I think people tend to forget that for many centuries book were the only game in town, and you'd have to write a play, a movie or a radio show if you wanted your content to reach an audience. That means what we currently see as blogspam, trash documentaries, stuff like Joe Rogan's podcasts whatever you categorize them were produced in news, magazines and book form.
You could look around for the industry of speed ghost writing memoires when big events happen: you get famous for being involved in news cycle for a few months ? a publisher will approach you to get a book out with your name on it and it will be out in the world pretty quick.
There is a misconception that "money spend on something" = "higher quality". A book needing an editor, a printer and money to distribute doesn't mean it's intrinsically better than something that costs less. It just mean it has reasonable prospects to sell, whatever the reason is.
Sure we can only focus on the top of the pyramid of books written as an art, but then we should do the same for all the other media (think about people starting a youtube channel after retiring from decades of work in a field. Would these channels be worse that a book meddled by an editor/publisher ? probably not)
> Consuming books is a very active way of thinking, and consuming video media is generally very passive
That's the argument based on the brain needing to read and parse the sentences. Sure it takes more effort that parsing audio. But that says nothing about the quality of the experience. You're more "engaged", the same way you'd be engage in a TV show if you had to crank a lever to run it frame by frame. But I think in this social media area we already understand that engagement is far from the best metric to evaluate if a content is good for your or not.
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