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OK, Hellmark, try this:
Let's assume you buy the books or continue to buy later instalments in the series, knowing full well there are (or there are likely to be, going on previous instances) mistakes galore in them.
Once bitten, twice shy? Or are you hoping against hope that this time will be different?
So, you start to read and, if good fortune smiles on you, there are very few literals this time in the text and you can get down to having an enjoyable experience with your book, as it's supposed to be.
If, on the other hand, the pages are littered with mistakes, you have to interrupt your reading and/or enjoyment to do somebody else's work in correcting them for your own pleasure. After doing that, I suppose you go back to page 1 and start all over again to get the gist of the book.
Why should that be so? Does doing your own proofreading and wasting some time make the book more valuable to you as a finished product, knowing that the author or the OCR software didn't get it right in the first place?
There's a very good saying around: You can't polish a **** (I guess you've heard it? Starts with T, ends with D).
To my way of thinking, doing the author's job is pretty much a waste of time. It didn't help him or her produce a better book this time and there's no proof it will help him or her produce a better one next time.
If Joe Blows burst into print and his publishers put his work up for viewing/purchasing on their site, and you like the carefully chosen snippet or precis you see in the come-on, you probably expect the rest of the book to be the same ... and why shouldn't you?
Once upon a time, like all good fairy stories start off, there used to be a masthead on publications giving the author's details and contact particulars. Now you get a faceless publisher's company name, if that.
Does a letter of complaint sent to the publisher get passed along to Joe Blow?
Does Joe reply to you? Should he? Shouldn't he?
If he doesn't reply in person to your letter, at the very least, wouldn't it make good business sense for either or both to put up a disclaimer on the company's site saying "Sorry"?
Yair, right!
Oops! What's that? A flock of pigs just flew past my window ...
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