Jeffrey Zeldman points out that there may not be enough money in e-books to properly QA the e-books; what you see on a Kindle may not be what is in the printed version of the book due to conversion errors and defects in the tools. And he’s right: A printed book is different than an e-book in many ways. However, the differences aren’t just all negative there are positive differences as well.

If a paper book is printed with errors, it stays that way. Publishers do not recall books to fix their errors, as it wouldn’t be economically feasible, just as it’s currently not economically feasible to do a full QA on e-books.  But the economies flip for correcting errors in e-books. Being software, e-books can be updated, unlike paper books, and, as a result, they can be corrected and updated in an economically feasible way. In fact, since we know Amazon can do things to books without our knowledge, it would be easy to update the errors in e-books on-the-fly.

Because some books are scanned (older books, mainly), there are scan errors that do not go corrected (A personal experience is with Robert B. Parker’s Promised Land, where the word ‘me’ is substituted for ‘the’ liberally throughout the book). And because publishers are getting much less revenue from e-books than printed books, they’re not interested in applying the QA necessary to correct the errors. When print starts bringing in less revenue that e-books, watch for the error rate trend to reverse.

Update Jan. 8, 2010: Well, this is embarassing. Yes, books DO get recalled (source: New York Times).