[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by ahi

I keep hearing anecdotes like this on mobileread... but to date I have yet to come across a single non-vanity-published paper book that has the sort of errors seemingly every eBook I've read contains.

- Ahi

See this post for the books/editions in question, and then this comment: (both by me)

I've recently purchased A Hero of Our Time, The Double & The Gambler, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Portable Chaucer.
Of that list of minor classics (which you might hope went some care into), the first contained a few indentation issues as well as a few typos/errors, the second contained about a half-dozen glaring typos, as well as a (superfluous) whitespace following every first letter of every chapter (as well as numerous other issues), in the third the footnotes/endnotes were missing, and the last one I have not looked at yet. While Fictionwise promised to forward each of my issues to the respective publishers, there is no mechanism to tell me an updated version is available on their website, so I'll most likely 'just have to guess' (if it happens at all in my lifetime).

For a list of the issues I found while reading The Double:

• tome < should be: to me
• bein < should be: be in
• there'sa < should be: there's a
• stupe-faction < contains an unnecessary dash
• ...Ina < should be: ...In a
• Byall < should be: by all
• 'we all"(' < should be: 'we all" ('
• Most if not all endnotes were preceded by a whitespace (i.e., “And one doesn’t get ahead in our age by imposture and shamelessness, my dear sir. Imposture and shamelessness, my dear sir, do not lead to any good, but end in the noose. Grishka Otrepyev 24 alone got ahead by imposture, my good sir, having deceived the blind people, and that not for long.”) [mobileread editboxes don't appear to support superscript yet ]
• "T HE NEXT MORNING, at exactly eight" < this happens to every first/second character of every chapter throughout the entire book

And that's in a 140p or so short novel.
Sure, more popular titles might get more proofing, more recent titles might get more proofing, (I emphasize might because most of the books I bought in that batch were fairly recent ebook publications) but in all I have to say I've run across darknet copies that were better-proofed (and formatted similarly, apart from artwork).