Over the weekend, Daring Fireball linked to a couple of older-but-still-interesting posts about the importance of formatting in e-books. First, there's this great, wonky piece about HTML and e-books:

For E-books to have good code, good code has to be found at every stage of the production process. That is not how things are done right now.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of commercially available E-books from legacy publishing houses were converted to “electronic format” by scanning printed books and turning the resulting OCR book copy into text files. (Indeed just text files, not structured markup.) Copy errors are so rampant that E-books are the first category of book in human history that could actually be returned as defective. This in turn has led to the equally rampant mythology that E-books are all about “formatting.” (They aren’t: they’re about structured text with styles attached.)

And a post at Luna's Café looked specifically at the ways that Kindle books are poorly formatted:

How can so little care be given to the presentation of text on a[n electronic] page? Do publishers care, or even realize, what is happening to the texts they lovingly commission, copy-edit, and proof-read, when they enter the electronic domain?

I think not, especially if they sub-contract the ebooking of their print files to Amazon, rather than apply quality control themselves.

I certainly do notice many more mistakes in e-books than I do in print books, although many of the errors I see—that is to say, particularly formatting errors—are similar to the errors you'll find in advance reading copies, which are often the texts I have to deal with as a book reviewer. It's interesting that publishers apply such little care to the finished e-product, when they have entire departments dedicated to making sure that printed books go out looking as close to perfect as humanly possible.