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One more thing I would like to note. I am currently reading the Mike Shepherd Kris Longknife series, which is in many ways a knockoff of the David Weber Honor Harrington series. The Shepherd books are published by Ace, a traditional publisher. It is pretty clear to me that neither the author nor the publisher spent any money on editing, or if they did hire editors, they went the least-expensive route and probably instructed the editor to make no changes.
It is not that the books are unreadable; they are quite readable. The problem is that they require a reader who understands language. Not only are there numerous homophone errors (sheer when shear was meant; there when their was meant; you're when your was meant; etc.) but there are sudden jumps in logic that require the reader to flip back pages to see how the author morphed the character to the current dialog/position.
These are not new books. They are from the early 2000s. What they are is symptomatic of what all publishers -- traditional and self -- are doing, which is trying to save a few dollars by skimping on the "invisible" or "too late" services. Editing is both of those in that good/bad editing isn't discovered until after a book is purchased and read, by which time it is often too late to return the book (or in the case of ebooks, impossible to do so), because most people buy a book and add it to their to-be-read pile rather than immediately tackle it.
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