As I read more and more ebooks on the Kindle, I’m starting to detect a quality-control problem. For example, in both of Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec mysteries (which are awesome, by the way), I’ve noticed formatting glitches galore. Hyphens are missing. Text is improperly italicized. And in Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails, two characters’ dialogue will often be smushed into the same paragraph, which makes for an incredibly confusing read.
Both de Bodard and Shevdon are published by Angry Robot, but the problem is not confined to one particular publisher. I’ve heard reports of similar problems in ebooks published by other companies. These kinds of basic formatting errors might have been understandable back in 2007, but ebooks have been around long enough that they should have worked out the kinks by now. I have to wonder, do ebooks actually undergo any kind of independent proofreading? Or do they just take the electronic files from the print edition and transform them into an ebook?
Codex Lochianus 
Hey, Andrew. I don’t know about Angry Robot, but in other e-publishing companies like Smashwords, the author has to do the formatting themselves, or have someone who knows what they are doing do it for them. Still plenty of room for mistakes. . .
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Andrew? 😛
Angry Robot isn’t a do-it-yourself type deal. They’re an imprint of Osprey (the military history publishers) which makes the formatting errors even more egregious.
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oops! I had just got done writing my friend Andrew before I wrote this. Sorry, Jason!
Yeah, that is weird. Seems like Osprey would have been a little more careful. Unfortunate.
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