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At the recent National Book Awards ceremony, T.J. Stiles was presented the nonfiction award for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In his acceptance speech, he graciously thanked the people at his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, who supported the book, including editorial assistants, copy editors and marketing staffers. Always nice when people behind the scenes get some credit at a ceremony like this, in addition to just the lead editor or agent. But then Stiles said something that struck me as odd.

“The advent of the e-book is fooling people into thinking that none of these people are necessary anymore,” Mr. Stiles said. “If they cease to exist, the books will only be worth the paper they are not printed on.”

I shudder to think what would happen if eBooks eliminated the entry-level publishing jobs that provide two very important services to this country: making books legible and gainfully employing the liberal arts majors who graduate from east coast colleges each year. I completely agree that we need well-educated, under-paid, highly ambitious young people to fact check, organize footnotes, sprinkle punctuation throughout, arrange cover art and manage book tours. I don’t agree that eBooks are making these jobs obsolete, or that anyone believes they should be. That last turn of phrase “the books will only be worth the paper they are not printed on” is quite nice though.

Stiles may be referring to the growing self-publishing industry, which is certainly facilitated by the rise of digital media. If you can’t break into publishing through traditional channels, there are plenty of options now for you to publish your own book, hawk it on Amazon, and wait for sales. As writer Maya Rudolph explains, however, self-publishing is not for everyone, or perhaps even for many.

It’s true that technology is enabling a rapid democratization of the culture-producing process: you can publish your own books, write a blog about eReaders, record and sell your own music, and post videos of you singing, dancing, or doing absolutely nothing. As a result there is a glut of really bad content. That’s an understatement. But there are the occasional gems, buried beneath the dreck. I’d like to think that we will get to a point where it becomes easier to find good content, and that there will always be a role for editors — and their assistants — to provide quality control. Now I’m off to download The First Tycoon. If I find a typo, I will take a photo of it, print it out, and mail it to T.J. Stiles.