"Respectable" Reading

So I'm thinking today about an incident that occurred a couple of summers ago. I had brought a romance novel to church with me because I had gotten there early and had to kill time until children's choir started. Someone approached me to ask about my book, which I put away before she reached me because I knew what she would say about romance novels. I was right--she wrote a whole blog entry about me, sniffing at my reading choice and just generally being very unkind about it.

Fast forward to today. I'm busy adding books to my shelf at Shelfari (MUST recommend that site to anyone who wants to feel better about giving their books away--you can still have them on a shelf and look at them whenever you want to!), and it occurs to me that the format of a book makes a big difference in people's attitudes. If you read a paperback romance, there are oodles of people who will feel perfectly free to look down on you for it and snipe about your plebeian preferences. Put the same book in a trade paperback format and charge five or six bucks more for it, however, and suddenly it acquires this veneer of acceptability. Like, if you paid that much for it, it must be worthy?!

Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced anything similar. If you have, feel free to jump in and comment here, because I would love to see what others think about this issue.