What is also amusing is all the errors in the comments in this blog.

Adin once again takes three pages to make a point he made perfectly adequately in the first two paragraphs. Maybe he needs to hire himself an editor.

Oh, wait. . .

I understand the frustration with poorly edited books, but don’t see why anyone is stuck with a nonrefundable purchase. Even if using the sample feature at places like Amazon and Smashwords doesn’t turn up these problems, I know Amazon will refund purchase money for pretty much any reason in the first 7 days. Do most other sellers give no sample and no refund to dissatisfied customers?

Indie books, which let’s face it we are all assuming are the problem being discussed, usually have good sample sizes. It’s the traditional publishers who fill so much of the front of the ebook with all their boasting and other unnecessary pages that there is no sample of the book. And their books are the ones full of OCR errors, different but just as aggravating, not to mention how many times I’ve seen “supercede” in supposedly professionally edited books lately.

@Deran — the term “editor” is an inclusive term. Developmental editors and copyeditors are part of the term. Many of these errors should also be caught by a developmental editor. Presumably, a good developmental editor, although not focused on spelling and grammar, would catch the more egregious errors; they should. And after the developmental editor and the author are satisfied with the manuscript, the manuscript should be read for the copyeditor whose focus is spelling, grammar, syntax, and rules compliance (in contrast, the developmental editor has much broader perspective, looking at, e.g., organization and flow). Then after the book is “typeset,” which is after the author has accepted or rejected the copyeditor’s suggestions and corrections, a third look should be had by a proofreader.

Self-published books are 95% ‘problematic’. Just like 95% of the slush pile sent to professional publishers is ‘problematic’ (and 4.9% not profitable and less than 1% accepted). Working out, from the self-published throng, which is the 95% and which is the 4.9% which were of an ‘acceptable’ quality but not for whatever reason accepted by a publisher is going to be one of the biggest barriers to self-published ebooks. No-one wants to sort the wheat from the chaff (and even when the publisher sorts out the wheat, they still need to do a solid amount of fixing, which is why they hire copy-editors).

The 95% is why I’m not keen to see publishers going away – I want those gatekeepers.

HOWEVER, publishers are doing themselves no favours allowing unproofread scanned ebooks with numerous scanning/conversion errors to fill the ebook market. They are simply lowering the reputation of ebooks by not treating them as a quality product.

Particularly problematic is the relationship of Amazon to all this. Amazon wants to see itself as a publisher of ebooks, not a distributor. It not only has its self-publishing division, but most Kindle editions of print books are on some level ‘produced/published’ by Amazon, not by the print publishers. [That is part of what this big argument about the agency model was - Amazon wanting to be seen as the ebook's publisher rather than its distributor.]

And Amazon patently doesn’t give a damn about the quality of the Kindle product.

FWIW, the problems that are being discussed here in the comments are really a little off target from the gist of the blog post. My concern in the blog post is with the idea that self-publishing authors can do everything capably themselves, which is the mantra of many ebookers: do it yourself, reap all the proceeds, and avoid the publishers.

Most of the problems that occur in ebooks from the big publishers are conversion problems. The problem is particularly acute with Amazon’s conversion process. Even if the publisher provides a pristine digital file in ePub, Amazon’s conversion process introduces errors and Amazon doesn’t proofread.

You got it backwards, Mags. No one wonders why publishers want to charge more. What we wonder is why should we pay hardcover prices for the poorly edited and proofread ebooks they offer. If they want me to pay as much as 14.99 for an ebook (and I wouldn’t mind, for an author i can’t wait to read) I expect them to give me a decent product in return. If they want me to pay the the same as people who buy paper books I expect to be treated the same way these people are, not as some lesser customer, which is how publishers have been treating ebook readers so far.

Writing is hard work. Editing and copy editing are hard work. Most folks don’t really understand how hard it is to write well and keep track of all the rules for the type of writing that is being done at any given time. These are skills that need to be honed over time and, once upon a time, publishing houses would mentor new writers in order for them to increase their skill. Some never learn, or get so big that they no longer let their editors call them out. (No, I won’t mention names, I think we all know who they are.)

One or two of these errors in a book are more than acceptable. This is the quality that should come after editing. I don’t know what quality publishers expect from their authors, but it would amaze me if a book riddled with such errors would be accepted. (Again, I have ZERO experience). I thought editors had more work fixxing commas, awkward phrasing, tense issues, etc. Perhaps this is why some indie authors never get published?

1. Having purchased about 5000 pbacks over the years and close to 400 ebooks, I have found NO correlation between price and editing/proofing. In fact, many of the most expensive ebooks I have bought were the worst in editing and proofing. Most publishers don’t care about making sure there ebooks are of the same quality as pbacks and yet they want to charge higher costs.

2. Funny thing about electronic conversions is that publishers seem to have big issues with them. It seems confusing to me because almost all books are submitted to publishers in an electronic form so all the editing occurs in the electronic form previous to publication in HC or mmpb. So I don’t know why the e-book is routinely messed up with errors. Again, I think it is simple laziness on the publishers part which unfortunately, decreases my opinion of them.

Even if a book is proofed for print, it needs to be proofed separately for electronic. I don’t trust electronic conversions, especially if OCR is involved, but anything that uses an algorithm to convert a text can introduce some kind of error. I used to QA this type of text for a living, and I know.