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@Fbone : As there is often no actual publisher or editor in between the writer and the reader*, the quality varies wildly. I have read some excellent free books, and a lot of good ones. Look for reviews to tell you how other people think. Read a sample - Smashwords has a fairly large part of any book free to sample.
*Some do have publishers, of course. Again, on Smashwords you can see the publisher if there is one, and search by publisher. If you find a publisher you trust, chances are all their books will have more or less the same level of quality.
Now Smashwords epub may not be the best around, but it's getting better, and they are friendly folk open to suggestions. The problem is that they have an automatic process of conversion, and often unexpected things in the input file create unexpected results. However, there is no DRM, and you can choose any format you like anyway, so it's not really a big deal. Commercial and locked bad epubs are a far bigger problem.
I realise the OP didn't ask specifically about Smashwords. It is, however, what comes to mind when I think about self-published books. (Feedbooks too, but that only has free ones)
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