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I tend to think a lot of the horrific typos and weird formatting comes from the relative newness of the medium.
Just as an example: Was talking with a couple folks from a big home building book distributer about e-books. Basically what they told me was that they were in the very early stages of going through and re-formatting their entire catalog for e-reading. This was back in May, I believe. Their goal was to have a very large chunk of their stuff ready to go before the end of this year, and then most of, if not all of the rest, by next year.
Seemed pretty quick to me, especially considering that their distribution wing is just a very, very small part of the larger company, which is simply a home building association.
My thought is that a lot of the "big dog" books from authors with advertised names and expensive promotion campaigns are being re-formatted as fast as possible to meet the sharply rising demands of this "new" market.
And I think that in that rush, a lot of quality control is being sacrificed. (Probably not a ground breaking revelation, I know!)
Didn't mean to completely go off tangent from the OP's question, though I think I did! My apologies. But it's good to know from the comments that e-books can be returned to most places like a regular print book!
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