Eer since I got an iPad I have been reading books almost exclusively on it. I like it for a few reasons, but one is that I do not have to keep a light on when reading at night, I stay up later than my partner usually so it's nice to not have to have the bedside light on.

What I have noticed is that the quality of the editing seems to pale in comparison to printed books. It is hard for me to say that this has been the case in all of the over 20 books I have read on the iPad (both iBooks and Kobo apps), but certainly the last few have had an inordinate amount of typos and words missing spaces. These books are not that old, originally published in early 2000s.

Anybody else see the quality of ebooks pale in comparison to printed books?

Funny that you should mention that. My wife said the same thing just yesterday. She uses a Kobo. Perhaps they don't use people editors any more and rely solely on text editing software (and we know how reliable that is).

I notice that ones I have paid for seem fine, but ones I download free often have errors.

I am wondering about the process that the publishers use to make the ebook. To me it would make sense that there is a digital copy that is sent to the printers for the hard copy and that it would be very easy to convert that digital copy to an ebook. Maybe it is a little more complicated than that, but in some of the books I have read it looks like the book has merely been OCR'd and had little to no editing done after the fact.

Ya I'm wondering the same stuff as well. I've seen quite a few commercially released ebooks that look like they have been OCR'ed as well. There are very obvious OCR typo errors in them as well as missing spaces like you say. That's a common issue with OCR'ed stuff. I know the difference as I have a ton that I OCR'ed myself -- at one point I OCR'ed my entire paperback collection into eBooks. My room mate had a killer double sided page scanner that made it simple so I unbound, scanned and rebound them all. It took about 3 days for > 150 books.

You would think that in this day and age an eBook would work like you say, that they output it from the actual final files that they print from, or that if they are OCR'ing them they would at least have an editor go over it a couple of times before releasing ... some of the errors are so insanely obvious (and repeated!) that they just seem to be publishing without anyone doing any work on them.