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Sadly, I see a fair few errors even in new books, just released recently. One of the error types I've seen several times lately in new releases is books where words aren't separated by a space. You'll be going along reading and see something like "hewouldhave" or "Jamessaid" or something like that. The other error that is common still in new releases is messing up dialog. Really inexcusable.
If one single person goes through a backlist OCR'd book, they can catch a great deal of the errors, even with a casual proofread. I'm not talking about a lengthy, careful, word by word comparison to the print book, but just a read through, marking all noticed errors. Just that sort of minimal proof can really improve things.
It's some additional labor, but for the average length 300 page book, I know it wouldn't take me more than 10 hours to do the read AND do all the corrections in Sigil. I also agree that fans of the author might well be willing to proof for free.
I'd be more forgiving of errors in backlist books if those same books weren't being released at $9.99 and up prices! I like the "beta version" idea!
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