[kevinr]

Your ebook readers get a lot of hints from the ebook file about how to present the material---I am light on details, but I believe them to be significant. It's true that there's no human there checking the typeblocks for rivers and orphans, but I can tell the difference between an ebook file produced by Calibre and one which a human has had a hand in, I happily pay my $13 for the latter, and woe betide the publisher when I discover that I paid $13 for an automated conversion. (The most egregious was a math book which OCR'd the formulas---from a book which was evidently set for print in LaTeX.)

When I'm translating plain text (Markdown-ish) input to LaTeX, I spend a bit of time going through by hand making sure all my formatting has converted correctly, any accents or non-roman characters are correct, the single- and double-quotes are correct, I haven't accidentally copy-pasted any ligatures, I have included hyphenation for nonstandard words, I've included any relevant non-breaking spaces, figures and headings and captions are flowing correctly, etc. etc. And all of these are still necessary when producing an ebook.

It's maddeningly detail-oriented, but the results are really noticeably much better, and in many cases make the difference between the text being readable and not. It's a bit like the cue dots at the movie theater---if you're not looking for them, you don't notice your uninterrupted experience unless the projectionist screws something up.

[daemin]

That also applies to code, I've seen some ebooks that have blocks of code formatted like they exist on a blog instead of in a printed environment. It made reading them a pain because code snippets were word wrapped badly, split over multiple pages, and you'd get pages and pages of code.

Given that ebooks are electronic, perhaps they could use some sort of pop out window for larger code snippets, so that they could be scrolled rather than in page format.

[Nutmog]

That's nice for a perfectionist. But how many readers care at all or could tell the difference if they tried? Do you struggle to read stories on the web because they're not hand typeset? I personally find that the content of a book completely dominates my experience over any of the superficial details. Well, I do use an annoying e-book reader that keeps accidentally turning pages for me and I lose my place. No amount of carefully placed hyphens will overcome that though, but a bit of software could.

[kevinr]

Most of those issues I mention are exactly the kinds of issues which pull the reader out of the text, even though he may not be able to pinpoint exactly why. Certainly often when I use Instapaper to read a web page or Calibre to convert ebooks I can read through the issues if I try hard enough, but it takes more effort than reading a well-produced book, and I somewhat regularly give up on automatically-converted texts because the issues are just too dire.

(Some of my other favorite conversion errors: Endnotes or references not hyperlinked. Chapters and other headings not correctly marked-up. Page numbers or other irrelevant header/footer material not stripped. Footnotes, margin notes, or other relevant header/footer material stripped. ...As you can tell, I'm great fun at cocktail parties.)