Dan Gross, my colleague at Newsweek and Slate, pinged me the other morning after he had read the reports that Sarah Palin’s new book—suddenly announced for next month—would not be available as an e-book. Gross, a pioneer in e-book publishing long before Tina Brown, had noticed that Palin’s publisher was following Ted Kennedy’s by holding off on the e-book format. Ever alive to a budding trend, Gross figured two important instances presaged something more than a coincidence. Could I, Dan wanted to know, provide a third case, and was this preference on the part of publishers for withholding the e-book on the biggest titles an economic issue? (Gross’ column on this point can be found here.)

I replied that I did have a third example that proved the rule—Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol—but the principle it revealed was less about the digital format and more about the role physical books play in the publishing industry.

Dan Brown’s publisher had been happy to supply the title in digital form. That allowed The Lost Symbol to sell more digital copies on the first day at Amazon than physical copies. This is because the thing of great value on the first day of sales was actually reading the book. (Merely owning it was not enough.) That’s something you can do whether you’ve read the book on paper or your Kindle.

With a big personality book, however, having read the book is far less important than owning it. These books are talismans, powerful objects that carry the aura of the person they’re associated with. That aura doesn’t attach to an e-book. You need something more substantial, at least something physical. When you buy a Kindle edition of a book, no one knows you’ve got it, no one can see you read it across an airplane aisle, and no one can admire it on your coffee table.

Another reason publishers are avoiding e-books for authors who sell their own fame is that the book itself is a bit of a luxury item. At $35, Kennedy’s publisher doesn’t want the e-book, with its $9.99 price, tarnishing the value of the physical book. Even if you don’t by the physical book for full price, you’re always going to feel ripped off by that $9.99 price being out there.

There’s nothing particularly new about talisman publishing. But a turning point came when Hillary Clinton released her book Living History in 2003. Here was a title bought for $8 million on the near-explicit premise that she would come clean about her husband. But in the time between the book deal and publication, Clinton had won a Senate seat and begun to position herself as a presidential contender. The idea that her book would be anodyne or unburdening was now laughable.