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This is a pet peeve of mine. Even if nobody actually proofreads a book before it is published, it's not that difficult to develop some basic regexes to catch the most egregious problems with punctuation and formatting. Spellcheck isn't exactly rocket science. Catching wrong-word-use (i.e., they're for their; its for it's) is more difficult, but if the other problems are minimized, then proofreaders could concentrate on these.
I'm not sure the problem is getting worse but it's definitely noticeable. In early ebooks, I blamed bad OCR technology and a rush to get the books out the door, but now I think publishers have reduced their professional proofreading staff in favor of providing the general public with advance reader copies, hoping those people will catch the worst problems. But I doubt the readers getting free advance reader copies see it as anything more than a way to get free books.
Also, some publishers are worse than others. Some publishers are quite good. In general (and this is VERY general), I prefer publishers with an affiliate in Britain. For whatever reason, they seem to be more meticulous about their work.
Lol, thanks for letting me rant. I thought I was just pickier than others in this regard, so it's nice to see I'm not the only one being driven crazy by sloppy publishing.
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