There are some good points made here.
@tompe - rotten food is not the same content as fresh food (chemically oxidized, etc.) so I don't understand your analogy.
@tompe - many people do not spell well, however virtually all text editors today contain spell-checking so it's mainly correctly spelled context errors that creep in. As an author (I'm not), I would expect any author with any degree of self-respect to engage at least a friend, if not an editor, to proof-read my work before risking public censure for sloppiness. No argument, just thinking out loud ...
@Elfwreck is spot-on regarding both the advantages of pBooks (most of which I never need or use) and the comments regarding the difference between "artsy" printed content vs. just plain text. Since most books, aside from coffee-table display hardcover books, are simple text, the comment doesn't fit most high volume, high profit pop novels. Anything that is re-published as a paperback is most likely not jazzed up with fancy fonts and formatting wizardry.
It is claimed that my Kindle3 can hold up to 3,000 books. I have no intention of testing that, but many books do contain drawings, photos and the like (Huckleberry Finn comes to mind). I suspect much future editing and storage will be in some generic format that can be sent directly and without editing to any device capable of displaying text (PC's, eReaders, tablets, smart phones, etc.).
If my little Kindle can hold a couple thousand books with illustrations, storage for the entire inventory of major publishers should be no problem at all. Having spent many hours working as a volunteer for Project Gutenberg/Distributed Proofreaders, I have a good feel for the capabilities of OCR readers and universally accessible formatting conventions. It's not a problem. In addition, most of the text editors @Elfwreck mentioned have inter-convertible formats. For pop novel publishing, RTF is universally readable by everything from browsers to Microsoft products to Open Office. There are always conversion tools available if there is a need.