Shoddy eBooks

Looks like publishers are getting dinged for outsourcing ebooks to third-parties who do shoddy jobs:

Needless to say, poor quality e-books are becoming something of an embarrassment for publishers trying to convince readers to pay a premium for downloads (as Kassia Kroszer recently pointed out in Publishing Perspectives: it is hard to justify higher e-book prices when the product simply isn’t up to scratch), and clearly it’s an issue publishers need to address sooner rather than later if they want win this argument.

The problem of substandard e-books partially stems from the fact that many publishers currently lack the means and expertise (and, to some extent, the will) to produce high quality e-book editions themselves. Their workflow and production process are set up for print, so the quickest way to create e-book files has been to outsource the job to third parties, inevitably with very little quality control.

It’ll be interesting to see how much pushback there is on this, or if lesser-quality ebooks become a new norm. Though this would seem to be another reason why authors wouldn’t want to be going the ebook-only route any time soon.