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I've been buying ebooks for just over a year now, and am still disappointed by the poor quality exhibited by some titles, frequently from mainstream publishers who definitely ought to be able to do better. I've found the problems seem to break down into:
a) straightforward typos - missing/misspelt words;
b) formatting problems - inappropriate/missing page breaks, duplicated TOC, cut & paste errors;
c) ebook-specific problems - incorrect display of accents/ligatures/diphthongs etc;
d) complete failure to display illustrations - I have three books where the illus are present in the epub file, but do not display;
e) and of course, the OCR errors.
Many of these problems would appear to be a direct result of the publishers taking an economical (cheapskate?) view of converting to ebook from pdf (see Neil's points above), but what also seems to come out is that publishers *still* are not embedding ebook production as a primary part of their workflow. I suspect that until publishers change this ebooks will be the poor relation of the industry.
I now make a point of informing publishers and the bookseller of significant quality issues - who knows, one day they may get fed up and take some notice! In the meantime, I can still strip off the DRM, correct the typos and improve my reading experience.
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