Publishing Is Broken, We're Drowning In Indie Books - And That's A Good Thing, was an article that I read for one of my other courses that discusses the merits of electronic authorship and publishing.  It suggests that the ease of publishing allows material that would otherwise not be viewed by the public to be read.  It also raised the point that if the sites that do the publishing set up some sort of editing/gatekeeper process they can take a currently mixed bag of good and bad and set up a system that allows a textbook case of "marketplace of ideas" to operate simply with users and writers.  It's an option that will make editors out of the public, much like the internet tends to do and along with this it also has been proven that more than just garbage is put out via electronic books publishing.