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If the publisher isn't responsible, then who is?
I have just finished reading "Too Many Cooks" and the quality of this book is just simply crap. It was probably scanned and OCR'd and it appears that no real effort was made to proof read the book. "I'll" appears as "Ill" all the way through the book. Opening single quotes are lost at random, making it confusing to follow at times.
There is a section that is supposed to represent a menu, the text is centered but nobody actually tried to read it or they would have put in line breaks so that it actually makes sense.
It would appear that books are being thrown together with as little effort as possible and any errors are then blamed on "technical" or "computer" or "formatting" problems. With a modest amount of effort (like maybe actually reading the resulting conversion) most of these problems could be eliminated. There is no excuse for typos in any ebook. Most layout problems could be solved with a little thought. There are edge cases where not knowing the resulting page size can yield strange results but those should be very rare (at least for most fiction books.)
It;s not as if I am not familiar with the process of scanning a book and creating a layout for an ebook. As an ongoing project I have been scanning and creating ebooks of a a lead, out of print but still under copyright author. I know what's involved and I also know that I can make a book without typos and a a readable format. If I can do, then any publisher can. If they won't, then they shouldn't be charging money for their product.
Fortunately for me, I got "too Many Cooks" from the library. I would be really pissed if I had paid for it.
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