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Originally Posted by tkavan
True, Best Buy doesn't test every single product. But every single product is a distinct physical entity, and there are probably millions of them in a Best Buy store. With an ebook, we're talking about a single file to be checked and fixed.
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Kobo claim to have 2.5 million titles in their store (which includes magazines). Even if they did do spot checks any reasonable sample would be a huge task.
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- Determine specifications for a book to display properly on their reader; inform publishers of these specifications; and ensure that publishers certify each book file as meeting these specifications.
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Without repeating what others have said, I think the short answer is they do but mistakes slip through. No publisher is going to certify that their books are free from typos any more than they intend them in the first place. The best you can hope for is that they'll be willing to fix and update them.
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- Do at least spot-checks to make sure that books do display properly on their reader.
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I suspect they do for mainstream bestsellers. Even then I doubt that they proof-read every page in every book checked. There might be a subset of the subset they do that for.
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- From the customer service point of view, be more proactive than just telling a customer that it's a publisher problem and they will inform the publisher of the complaint. That, in my experience, is a black hole from which nothing further is heard.
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I think they need to inform publishers but they need to make sure that it doesn't appear as a "black hole". Maybe publishers need to get together and create a site where customers can report errors and track whether and when new versions are released. Retailers like Kobo could then get a link to such a site.
Also remember that Kobo don't own the copyright on these books. The publishers either own it or have rights to it. Which means that Kobo can't just go changing the text of these books without some form of agreement. They probably do have agreements in place in order to produce kepubs but I doubt that gives them to right to fix typos in epubs, and even with kepubs I suspect the publishers would want to be consulted.