Dig­i­tal Book World and it’s blog whose mis­sion is to “[focus] on pub­lish­ing strate­gies, not tools; solu­tions, not the­o­ries; prac­ti­cal­ity, not pun­ditry” spot­lights Liza Daly’s pre­sen­ta­tion (Ms. Daly is an expe­ri­enced soft­ware engi­neer and con­sul­tant for dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing). Her pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2010 Dig­i­tal Book World Con­fer­ence talked about essen­tially, ebook qual­ity con­trol. Timely topic since major pub­lish­ers are push­ing for higher ebook prices.

Ms. Daly’s pre­sen­ta­tion reflects exactly how I feel about the state of ebooks today. For starters, she dis­cusses “front mat­ter” or extra­ne­ous info that read­ers typ­i­cally run across in ebooks. Do I care to thumb through the acknowl­edg­ments page, the copy­right page and sev­eral more blank pages before I start read­ing? No.

Lack of cov­ers — most annoy­ing. But the argu­ment always cir­cles back to well, you’re not even read­ing on a device that sports color any­way so what’s the big deal. It’s a big deal. In color or not, I would like to look at the orig­i­nal cover ver­sus look­ing at a mock-up with book title, author name and pub­lisher name. Its an eye-sore and it looks tacky. Besides, Stanza and eReader apps for iPhone sports color covers.

Right now I am read­ing an secure ePub title that has num­bers in the mar­gins. It’s not entirely both­er­some but I do notice it and why is it even there? Ms. Daly also touches on the lack of con­ver­sa­tion qual­ity con­trol and edi­to­r­ial errors. This is another big area. In many instances while read­ing Stieg Larsson’s ebooks, I’ve run across need­less errors. It’s jar­ring when you have to fig­ure stuff like this out: “are­tired” when it’s actu­ally this –> “a retired…” for example.

But from what I’ve read online (and cor­rect me if I’m wrong), pub­lish­ers aren’t really car­ing about the money they make from ebooks any­way since the high prices are set to be pro­hib­i­tive. We are told repeat­edly that the big six make their money from hard­cov­ers. So will any of this sink in? Make a difference?

Any­way, I highly rec­om­mend read­ing Dig­i­tal Book World as it has inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion for read­ers or ebook read­ers. It is a most infor­ma­tive blog thus far, that keeps its pulse on the trends and changes and nuances of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing today.