I can understand your ire and can only imagine that it's worse since it was a reference book instead of a general reading book.

I remember when the first few books I picked up were formatted (badly) for handheld devices and contained horribly wide margins, TOCs that didn't actually link anywhere and misspellings and bad hyphenation. Basically the books being sold were hard formatted for PDAs or just scanned in, ran through a OCR and packaged in whatever ebook format was for sale.

Oddly enough readers seemed to notice these problems and, in our standard formation of pitchforks and e-tar, let the vendors know. They in turn made the publishers aware that sales were being lost. (A lot were lost to self made versions of works too. Kinda embarrassing to charge as much as they were and have it be completely inferior to a version here at Mobileread.)

Excuses were made. (One of my favorites was that it took a lot of work to get a new book into an e-format. Lots and lots of extra work on top of everything needed to get it into paper form. It's not like you could just plug an electronic manuscript into some sort of program and have a readable book just pop out! sigh.....)

Having said all that, most books now, especially the newer ones, ARE formatted correctly. You actually have to work at it to screw them up now. The more mainstream the title or more inclined the publisher is towards d-formats (O'Reilly technical books is a good example of the latter) the better they read and navigate. Low volume books and ones published a few years back are the ones most likely to still have problems.

(Though I've heard rumors....vague rumors....that some people will still go to extreme lengths to avoid anything with a DRM that can't be circumvented yet to avoid the exact problem you had. A badly formatted book without DRM can be fixed. A badly formatted book with DRM should have coupons for some sort of over the counter pain medication. Like a hammer.)