[QUOTE=Michael J Hunt;856948]
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(1) Am I being naive, but aren't all books published in both forms identical? Could this only be true for books that are published with the intention of their appearing in both forms? (2) Also, is it possible for unwanted errors to creep in during conversion from one format to another? (3) If this is so, surely the publisher should subject the final pdf version to a proof-read before he sells it.
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1) The PDF looks the same (for some values of "same") as the printed version. Not all ebooks are released in PDF format, and the differences in appearance and functionality can be rather large.
This is especially true for technical books with charts & graphs, or image-heavy books, for some obvious and some less-than-obvious reasons. Obvious: a screen the size of your palm is obviously going to change the way a picture looks, and is going to be troublesome for a large complex chart. Less obvious: some formats have limitations on what kinds of images they can hold, or what digital size the images an be.
You can check out some of the differences by getting a couple of free ebook readers (Stanza, Calibre, Mobipocket Reader, the Firefox ePub plugin, etc.) and trying a few ebooks, both the same & different formats, on each of them. If you're like most people, your initial reaction will be, "huh. Yeah, they look a bit different, but they all work okay. I can see wanting the different background colors of this one, or the different menu options of that one, but so what?"
However, when those differences are translated to portable devices, it all changes. In order to fit ebooks on a 3" wide screen, the text has to either be very tiny--or involve a whole *lot* of page turns. In order to go to e-ink, the book is black-and-white (grayscale for images); there's no colored text. And all small screens have to choose between justified text with large gaps between words, or ragged right edges. Some make this choice for you; some allow you to decide.
To get a *bit* of a feel for how that works, open a PDF of your choice, and set the viewing window to a size of about 4"x6" on the computer screen. Then try reading in that.
PDF is only a good format for ebooks if the screen being read on is the same size (or bigger) than the page-size of the PDF.
2) errors--as mentioned, some errors creep in during conversion. Hyphenation and the occasional odd line-break problem are chief. Going to non-PDF forms, other common errors include bad formatting--no table of contents, no metadata (so the book shows up on a portable device as "Microsoft Word - OMOcaranorthARE.rtf" because nobody fixed it before PDF conversion), no page breaks between chapters. Sometimes all text formatting is stripped out; sometimes just quoted indents & other paragraph formatting are lost.
3) Bigger errors: however, those aren't the main errors people complain about. Most professional ebooks made from books more than ~5 years old are made by scanning & OCR'ing a physical book, because no digital copy exists anymore. And publishers are *terrible* about proofing those--often, they're sent through automatic software, with, as far as customers can tell, no human supervision before they're sold. So they have OCR errors, formatting errors, sometimes missing words, often missing all graphics... nobody proofreads them; nobody even runs a basic spellcheck on them.
The first professional release of Tolkien's books included one with a title page that said "Tha Hobbit."
We are aware, when we buy professional ebooks, that we're getting something of unknown quality, and if it's DRM'd, we can't even (easily, legally) edit it to fix the worst of the problems.