Quality Writing vs. Good Writing

I'm in this discussion over at jeff_duntemann's shop regarding writing. Jeff wants to create a "Gumball Machine" to dispense ebooks, thus improving his (and other) author's incomes. The conversation took a crossover into how to know if a book / short story was any good or not. Here was my comment:

Traditional publishers do a good job producing "quality" books, even if they're not "good." Now, I know enough about manufacturing to be dangerous, but I do know this. In a factory, quality is defined as meeting the design specifications. A quality part can be tinny, flimsy and cheap, but if the drawing calls for tinny, flimsy and cheap, then the part meets quality standards.

In writing, a “quality” book is one that:
- Uses generally-accepted grammar
- All the chapters advance the plot
- Isn’t repetitious. If you need to explain how the Q-35 Demodulator works, you do so once, even if five different characters need it explained to them.

And so on. There are a lot of self-published books out there (my cousin wrote one) that are simply painful to read because of just these sort of quality defects. Maybe that’s another part of the publishing process to outsource.