Production is in charge of organizing the rounds of copyediting, proofs and getting everything to the printers, but they aren’t in charge of the printed books which go to warehouses. I doubt much quality control goes on at the warehouses. Paper, ink and glue, the big costs, are gotten as cheaply as possible. If there are problems, booksellers, wholesalers and distributors let publishers know about “errata” and they fix it in the next edition. Despite attempts to improve orders and shipping procedures, books are still shipped out in large numbers and come back in large numbers as returns. Mass market paperbacks are so unimportant that they only ship the front covers back and pulp the rest, so quality is not the big concern.

The publishers have no electronics divisions at this point. They don’t have people who know how to do e-books. They hire companies or have Amazon do it. They have no ability to quality control e-books, and since it’s only 3% of their market, they have little incentive to make a big effort to put out a high quality product or to price it competitively. You’ll either buy it or you won’t. They don’t see a good angle for them yet in that market, and most of the profits on e-publishing are going to companies like Amazon.

Or Sony, or Apple — big electronic firms who are the richest companies in the world, who have armies of quality control people and design techs, who have technology at their disposal that book publishers can only dream of ever obtaining — technology that the electronics companies invented, so if they want to sell e-books, they could very well use it on producing the things they are licensing. The last twenty-five years of whirlwind computer development swept right by book publishing, which was mired in the 1950′s ways of doing business. Compared to book publishers, newspapers are cutting edge.

So of course, the book publishers want Amazon, Sony and Apple to figure it out for them and to buy the rights, figure out the pricing, give them their cut of sales and leave them out of the tech. Authors have to do most of their own publicity too. It’s been a semi-effective strategy to sit back and let others figure out things for them.

Does that mean that authors are going to end up selling directly to Apple for e-books? Not likely, because Apple doesn’t want to invest that kind of time on little old books. They want the publishers to supply them with titles and have a big inventory of books, mags, newspapers, etc. for their e-readers and other devices.

There’s a huge potential market for book publishers with e-books of readers who don’t buy print books and readers who do but want lots of books. But that market is not going to be there enough until Apple, Amazon and the other tech companies work out their tech infrastructure and their DRM issues, which involves many other industries besides book publishing. When they do, it will first help the newspapers, online sites and magazines, and only then will it help the book publishers. It’s going to be a clutzy, complicated, poorly financed transition.

So yes, publishers undercut their market. They are always undercutting their market. It’s one of the most inefficient, trapped industries around. It has the fewest vendors selling its products. It makes some money, it’s glamorous, but it’s not fulfilling its potential yet. If you want change to happen, go bug Apple, not Random House. Because Random House isn’t up to it, hasn’t the money for it, and has not yet been given enough reason or guarantees to care about e-books.

They’re waiting. And since an average print book might only sell 5,000-10,000 copies, they aren’t particularly freaked that a high priced e-book might only sell a few thousand copies. Book publishers are used to working on such small scales. They are used to readers putting up with errors because they looove books, even if those readers sometimes complain. So it’s not just a matter of quality service — it’s big shifts in how publishing operates.

Some of the big publishing firms are working on ways to improve print operations. Unfortunately, a lot of those new experiments involve really poor terms for authors, and quite a few of them won’t work out. But there may be improvements in print or e-publishing, especially if Apple et. al. improves the tech, and also buys your argument that they can charge $50 for a game or a program, $20 for a CD or a DVD, but you want them to charge $6.99 for an e-book.

But in the meantime, as Amazon showed you with the Kindle, nobody is going to accommodate you over what they see as their short-term profitline as they attempt to snag gadget buyers who have little else available to buy. And the tech hapless publishers least of all. It’s not going to happen yet.

Another problem is many books seem to be edited by people for whom English seems to be a second language. The errors are consistent through the text, and it goes beyond homophones. No writer would make such an error in language.

This goes well past bad grammar or some academic complaint scholarly texts and hits ordinary consumers where it matters, in the disruption of the story. Fiction is meant to be a coherent, cohesive whole, not something you have to fight and reread because of editing errors. Everything from missing commas to using the wrong word stops the flow, forces the reader to go back and try and work out what SHOULD have been there, and then try and get back into the story again. I’ve actually given up on both ebooks and prints books when I hit the one error too many.

The sad part is, publishers don’t care. Surely writers must hate seeing their efforts corrupted by bad editing ruining their hard work, yet I’ve never seen a writer complain on any of the forums. I cannot help but wonder why.