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Originally Posted by Teyrnon
Hmm...How common are egregious formatting errors in ebooks? As I think about it I have the sinking feeling it's going to be awhile before the big publishers really start to care. Few, if any of their execs or employees probably use ebooks. This is new territory for them and I suspect most see it as a case of dump to a file, send file to whoever, and forget it.
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From what I can tell, sadly it seems to be fairly common. The copy of Anathem that I purchased from Sony has some strings of what should be small caps, but they're not set in small caps. Other parts of the book have the small caps set just fine, so it's pretty clear that someone/something missed these. The text was pretty much nonsensical as written without having the various quotes/engravings offset in some way. Thankfully it was only a few lines. When I checked out the PDF from my library to compare it suddenly made a lot more sense.
As others have mentioned elsewhere, some books don't have section breaks where they should (the paragraphs just run into each other), and there's the drop cap/initial cap issue mentioned here. Who knows what else is badly formatted out there, especially in books that actually use somewhat complex layout...