Big Reason #1: Bad Editing
Granted. While there are indeed some horribly sloppy things that get through the mainstream presses, including some atrocious typos, books that have been past a professional editor, however briefly, won't contain a two-page run-on sentence that wasn't intended to be avant-garde or "artistic." Nor do they have blurb text like
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Two young aspiring amateur detectives, One university campus,and a Santa Claus set upon destryoying human rights...
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nor internal quotes like
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Ali and Esther however, refused to give up. Their course was done away with but their society was still alive, so if any society had to put themselves out there more than the others it would be them. And put themselves out there they did. A new set of Freshers, or as the American’s call it ‘Freshmen’ (which I’ve personally never understood myself because some of them pong like the armpits of hell itself) , found their way on to campus and on settling into their new life joined the human rights society. But that’ not what got Esther so upset. The human rights society in a bid to cap a particularly good year for the group set up a Christmas tree event.
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I think this is likely to remain the big issue for indie books, because although some, even many, are excellently well-written, they'll always be greatly outnumbered by the offerings of people who think their own data-dumps are interesting to other people.
Big Reason #2: Quantity Over Quality
The article seems unclear; this point seems to be an adjunct to "lack of editing," as in "skipping the editing makes it easy for authors to churn out lots of ebooks, none of which are particularly readable." Which it does, but I'm not seeing that as a separate reason.
One person says the indie movement won't be taken seriously until all published books are held to a basic minimum standard of literary quality--punctuation, grammar, somewhat-cohesive plot. It's not gonna happen. The internet isn't going to ever insist that content be well-written, and there's not going to be a nice sharp line between "stuff I threw together at my blog" and "my novel, published in serial form online."
Big Reason #3 – The Lack of Gatekeepers
"Having a trusted place to find credible reviews would certainly help separate the good from the terrible," the article says. Yes, it would. And those places are starting to appear. There isn't going to be a replacement for the gatekeepers that worked when "book publishing" was measured in the tens of thousands per year, not millions. And there will continue to be plenty of people willing to take a chance on unfiltered content.
Big Reason #4 – Crappy Covers
. I love this series; I waited for YEARS for ebooks; I cringe when I recommend them to friends because the covers are SO BAD. (Where are the tentacles? Nothing about those covers even says "science fiction," much less "post-apoc scifi where humanity has split into two symbiotic subraces.")