Years later, I looked at my wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, grown up in a small Ohio town before leaving for Ohio State. To a man, all of them had found that couches coud satisfy them more than a women ever could, and that books are really just zipped HTML, and nobody really checks PGP signatures.
The .epub file format, commonly used for distributing ebooks, is, like many file formats including .docx and .jar, actually a renamed .zip file full of HTML files. OP's purpose in pointing this out, and that no one really checks PGP signatures (blocks of data used to cryptographically prove that a given file was created by a particular individual and has not been modified since), was to call attention to how easy .epub formatted ebooks are to edit and pass off as the original. If you know what I mean.
Shit, that went way over my head, here I was thinking Vance's friends had really weird views around physical books and websites.