Penguin Publishing Pissing Off Readers

From the Amazon Discussion Boards:

Penguin is absolutely pissing me off with their slip shod editing of e-books. The most egregious example recently is Kat Richardson's latest Grey Walker. About half of the chapters are missing the first letter of the first paragraph and almost every word beginning with Q is capitalized (e.g.: the Question). This after a two month delay in delivery.

This isn't even close to being the only poorly edited eBook Penguin has published, just one of the worst. It is the third book this month that I bought.

I am speculating on this point, but I strongly suspect that this is the result of having the IT department convert the paper copy to eBook format using OCR instead of starting with the soft copy used for typesetting. IT people do IT work, they are not trained as editors.

The best evidence I for this is:

1: the corporate moaning about the conversion price
2: looking at the hard copy of "Labyrinth", the missing letters are printed 5 lines tall and with gradient coloring - thus causing the OCR to class them as graphics rather than letters.

Why We Love Random House: From an Amazon Kindle Discussion Board:

"The level of love that I have for Random House for not going with the agency model cannot be overstated. In the same way that I shy away from Penguin books, I favor Random house.

I know a couple of people with iPads. They downloaded Kindle for iPad so they could have a decent assortment of books, and once downloaded, tend to use Amazon for all their book purchases. I mean for God's sake, the iBookstore didn't even have the Stieg Larson books."