[SmokeAndMirrors]

This is just pathetic. The writer makes a valiant attempt to make the publishers not look quite so lazy and not-worth-their-salaries as they are, but it boils down to this:

The publishers don't care. They aren't doing their jobs, because they can afford to be egregiously lazy. With pBooks, they need to give people a good reason to not buy used. In the eBook world, they don't - for most people, they probably don't know about the world of ereading that exists outside the publishing houses (MobileReaders and other aficionados not withstanding) and don't know any better but to buy everything from them on Amazon and B&N.

So they gut you for 3 bucks more than the new paperback edition costs and 3 TIMES more than it would cost used, even though it cost pennies on the dollar for the ebook production vs. the paperback production, and they expect us to pay them these utterly insane prices even though they obviously aren't doing their jobs. I've never seen errors like this in a pBook.

Ebooks are badly edited (and at times, it seems, not edited at all) because the publishing houses quite simply don't care. They've set up a business model in the ebook world that could pretty much be called a scam, and at least for now, no one is really doing anything about it, so they just get lazier and lazier, jack their prices higher and higher, and for some reason people keep paying it.

My Project Gutenberg ebooks are actually probably better edited than much of the stuff I'm expected to pay $10 for (no way in hell - thank you, county library). And Project Gutenberg gives their books away. I'd love to see a publisher try to explain to me why I should pay them $10 for an ebook that looks like it was edited by my 7-year-old niece.