I’m not sure this is the best story to explain the puzzle proposed. If the idea can be easily extracted from the book while leafing through it in the store, then no one needs to buy it at all. Burying the idea in a husk that requires extraction effort may force people to purchase the book, which could explain why this is done. It’s a form of IP management, making sure you get paid for your idea.

Besides this simple competing explanation, the signalling equilibrium story requires what is known as a “sorting condition”–something that prevents editors from faking out readers by publishing bad ideas. After all, if readers think “the idea must be good if it was published” then publishers would have an incentive to publish bad stuff too, which would break down the putative equilibrium. Maybe we could assume that better ideas get word-of-mouth-induced purchases and bad ideas don’t, and then assume that the cost of publishing a book exceeds revenues in the absence of word-of-mouth recommendations. In that case, bad books aren’t worth publishing and good books are. Throw in some errors in editors’ taste and you might be able to explain the range of quality on offer in the book market. I’d hate to think that there’s even worse crap written but not being published, though.

In any case, that’s one thing I appreciated about Flock and Flow was that it was long enough to effectively make the point, but didn’t belabor it needlessly for another 50-100 pages.

-Adam

Spiral Dynamics by Beck and Cowan is a classic for this; they even put the key diagram on the flysheet flaps(?).

If you went into a book shop just steal the flysheet (what are they called?!?!) but not the book, would this be theft?

Amazon summaries/reviews are a more legal way of achieving the same thing.