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Harper Collins recently revealed to me (through one of its authors) that they farm out the process of scanning and OCR'ing backlist titles at a minimum cost per book. Apparently the cost of prepping the copy doesn't include proofing the resultant copy, which HC releases onto the market with not even a cursory check. Comments I've seen elsewhere lead me to believe that this is the norm with publishers.
The impression I get from this is that publishers like HC don't care about the content at all, just the impression that they are putting it out there for whatever rubes want to pay for it. (They are also clearly applying the bulk of their efforts to new books, which would be expected to earn them more profit per book in the shorter term.) Think of it like a used book market that publishers really aren't interested in entering.
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