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I'm not trying to excuse the problem -- just explain it.
As mentioned earlier, most of these are backlist titles that don't exist in electronic form. They are scanned and a computer tries to guess the text based on the scanned picture (OCR). These guesses are inaccurate enough that there are frustrating errors.
The problem is that for many of the backlist titles the sales will be very small. it would not be cost effective to convert them if the manual correction process was more than minimal. The easiest alternative would be to see publishers begin a re-review process. All the old books would enter a new review process to discover which had withstood the test of time and were worthy of a full relaunch. This would be expensive and slow.
I suspect many publishers have chosen to quickly convert everything in a "Beta" format and then plan to clean up the books that show stronger sales. The missing step here is that these books should be labeled beta versions and should be sold for deeply discounted prices. If this were true many customers might be more tolerant of the mistakes if they understood the alternative was no book at all.
It seems to me that a better model would be a crowd sourced model. Release it for free, Wikipedia style. As the book becomes higher quality, you could begin to increase the price. This would require new Kindle/EPUB software to allow cloud based reading and corrections in the early days.
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