The quality of the layout and typography in commercially published e-books, that is.  (So does the quality of non-commercially-published e-books, but those are beyond the scope of this post.)

To a large extent, the quality of an e-book depends upon whether the publisher is working from an electronic version of the manuscript as originally submitted (a lot of publishers these days ask for either electronic-only MSS or a combination of electronic and hardcopy), or whether they’re working from a scanned hardcopy version of the published book.

It used to be mostly pirates who worked from scanned hardcopy. These days, though, a number of legitimate publishers are working on bringing their backlist titles out as e-books, and a number of authors are doing the same thing with their own works for which the rights have reverted. In both cases, if the original book was produced during the typewriter era, or in the early days of word processing, scanning a sacrificed hardcopy may be the only way — short of re-keying the whole thing — to get an electronic text.

A lot also depends on whether or not the publisher bothers to have somebody proofread the e-book before it’s released. Dead-tree books are copyedited, and have the copyedited MS gone over by the author before being set into type, and then the typeset MS is gone over again by both the publishing house and the author before being sent to the printer. Even so, errors will creep in. Sometimes it’s just because no matter how many sets of eyes look at a thing, something’s going to get missed; other times, very bad stuff can happen at the printer’s end and not get noticed until angry book buyers start sending back their copies. Turning hardcopy into e-text, if the publisher is converting something that never had an electronic MS, often involves taking apart a physical copy of the book and scanning it page by page, which not only preserves any existing errors but opens the way for even more.

Some publishing houses clearly take care with the process of turning hardcopy into an e-book; others just as clearly don’t do much more than pour the however-generated e-text into a standard template and don’t bother much with it after that.

Your best bet is probably to write to the publisher about any errors you find. It’s not likely to get you a better version of that particular book, but it might encourage them to take more care with the process in the future.

I’m talking about the barrier between “literary” and “genre” fiction — and the quotes are deliberate, because I consider the distinction, and the barrier, to be an essentially artificial one.

The way it works, published fiction in the English-speaking world (and maybe elsewhere, for all I know, but it’s not a subject upon which I have the authority to speak) divides itself roughly into three parts.  First, you have literary fiction — the books that are reviewed in the literary supplements of national newspapers, that win the major literary prizes, that garner their authors speaking engagements and writer-in-residence posts at big-name universities.  Most of this is mimetic realism, which is to say it is set in and depicts the world as we have agreed to believe it is; occasionally it detours into things like magical realism or surrealism, but mostly it leaves that sort of thing to writers who — while they may write in English — aren’t themselves English or American.  The literary fiction that makes the news and wins the prizes is usually quite good (one of the most useful things I learned on the way to a Ph.D. in English was how to recognize a well-written example of something I didn’t particularly like); I’m not sure what the literary establishment does with the ninety percent that isn’t.  Maybe it’s taken out behind the library and quietly buried in a shallow grave?

Then you have popular commercial fiction, the stuff that’s never going to win its author any big serious awards, but can sometimes earn huge pots of money.  Most of this is also set in present-day consensus reality, only with the dial turned up to eleven.  These are the books that get reviewed in job lots under the header “summer beach reading” or the like; they’re the ones that turn up on the paperback shelves in airport bookstores.  On the high end, they aspire to crossing over into the literary division, but — like social climbers hoping to get invited to the better parties — this seldom works.  The writers of popular commercial fiction are supposed to be content with their money and know their place.

On the low end, popular commercial fiction starts peeling off into the beginnings of genre — chick lit, technothrillers, suspense, and so forth.  But what most readers and writers consider to be genre lit are the things that have their own publishing houses, or their own lines at major publishers:  mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction.  Westerns used to be a genre, but over the past few decades they’ve retreated back into historical fiction, and from there a few have even moved over into literary.  (Historical fiction has always had an easier time crossing the border than some of the other genres; I’m not sure why.)  Nurse novels are for all intents and purposes extinct.  And so forth.  Genre lit doesn’t make the kind of big money that popular commercial fiction can; and it sure as heck doesn’t get the respect that literary fiction commands.

Why on earth, then, does anybody write genre fiction?  For love, in some cases; for fun, in others.  And because the most exciting place to work, in the landscape of literary creation, is outside the walls of literary respectability, because that’s always been where the excitement starts.