On the Abundance of Books That Read Like Glorified Magazine Articles

Bad books are nothing new, of course. Nor, for that matter, are books bad in that specific way of using a lot of words to say nearly nothing at all. Yet it does seem to me that this particular problem has been getting much worse, with a great many highly publicized books put out by the major presses--the Big Money shops that the idiot bullies who bash the self-published put on such a high pedestal--are little more than magazine articles, and often brief, mediocre magazine articles at that, huffed and puffed into marginally full-length volumes (with "color," "human interest" and just plain cumbersome, amateurish writing) so that their "author" can go and preen on TV and tell people to throw away thirty dollars on their hardcover.

Looking at all this I generally thought it a matter of publishers simply putting out flimsy product. But is it actually the case that puffed-up magazine articles are all a large part of the public can handle? What do you think?