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If books posted on sites like Project Gutenberg were commonly altered, publishers would be pointing to such alterations in order to persuade people to buy public domain books from them instead of downloading the free version. Since we don't see this, either it's not a common phenomenon, or no one has noticed. It's possible that someone could maliciously upload an altered book, but either it's a popular book, and someone would notice, or it is an unpopular book and no one is reading it in the first place. It seems like a lot of bother to upload an altered book that no one is going to read anyway. There are scan errors in some PG books, if someone is concerned about avoiding malicious edits or scan errors, they can always buy a copy. A publisher would lose sales if they had a lot of errors, and malicious alterations could put them out of business. Pay or download the free version, it's your choice.
With works under copyright, the copyright holder can release an altered version and stop selling the original version. This is true whether the book is paper or e-ink. It's true that you can point to the paper version, but that doesn't do much if the only version on sale is the altered version. We don't have to like it, but there's not much we could do about it.
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