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I'm not saying you don't; quite the opposite, in fact.
He was suggesting that books that are already in electronic format be tagged with some quasi-HTML (the main difference, apparently, being using phrases instead of abbreviations, like [bold text starts here] instead of <b>) and humans do something when they see that tag, presumably selecting the relevant text and clicking a "bold" button, when converting it to some particular ebook format. Precisely why a human pushing buttons would be faster or more accurate than an HTML renderer eludes my comprehension.
That's not where the problems are. The problems are in bad scans that aren't even spell-checked, or spell-checked but not proofread. Those are what need to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb by a real human. And those, unfortunately, are also what is sold by publishers putting greed ahead of all else, including their own long-term profitability.
You'll notice that recent Project Gutenberg books -- basically, any that have been through the Distributed Proofreading Project -- are much superior in quality to most backlist commercial ebooks. And they are at times working with books hundreds of years old, victims of age and worn type. They're proofread by humans -- why not go do a page? That makes all the difference. That's where the human eye is needed: checking the scan against the original. Not in reading through a computer file and clicking "bold" every time you see [bold text starts here].
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