Umm, Old Hack, you're thinking of PRINTED galleys. In the ebook world, galleys are done entirely electronically. And having had about 20 books published in my career, in both print and ebook for major houses, editing DOES occur at the galley stage.
You are using the terminology incorrectly--and you won't find anyone who has been making ebooks professionally longer than I have. Anywhere.
The meaning of "galley" doesn't change in term of producing ebooks.
Did the pages have page numbers? If so, they aren't galleys--even in ebooks.
Granted, it's usually just line-level proofreading, but sometimes things slip through the cracks of the content edit/copyediting phases and only get caught at galley phase.
Again, this is chillingly ignorant; the phrase "just line-level" is, well, it's just
wrong. Line-level editing is where most editing occurs.
(In addition, sometimes things get messed up royally when the manuscript gets converted from MS Word to the bound/print page edition, which is why it's important to do thorough galley proofs.
This too is worrisome; this is what is conventionally referred to as a dump. This is the wrong point to be doing any copyediting of any sort at all -- even on a digital only title.
I've had books end up on shelves in bookstores with major problems like missing paragraphs happen because the galley phase wasn't attended to properly).
That's a production error that should have been caught pre-galleys. The only time I've seen that happen with a mainstream publisher is when the wrong postscript file got sent to the printer. That's pretty rare these days because production departments use workflow-based file management and media systems.
The content edit and copyedit at Decadent was superb---it went through a full five levels of both with three editors apiece.
Their Web site is barely in standard English. They make basic grammar errors. They need to do something very quickly about that. I note that their covers show poorly aliased type as well, and problems with layers. They don't seem to do any kerning on title text at all.
I should also note----when I worked with Random House, my galleys were also done electronically. Print galleys are virtually unheard of nowadays.
Who did you work with ? When ? What department? I was typesetting for Random House from 1992 to 2002 as freelancer. If you've picked up a Modern Library book, there's a good chance I worked on it--and the ebook. Was it your own book or were you editing?
I note that Random House's current process is to convert Quark to Acrobat, and print hardcopy for the copy editor and proofer. I just checked. Authors receive a .pdf and at least one bound ARC. Editors, copy editors and proofers work off hardcopy. They're considering using PDFPen in a pilot project in 2011.
I really don't appreciate the implication that I don't know what I'm talking about. After nearly 20 years in the biz and 20 books of my own (plus another 15 or so that I've edited) I think I know the process inside and out.
What makes your position difficult is that you
keep misusing basic terms of art--terms with 300 years of history whose meanings haven't changed. I've checked your post history; you do it over and over. When someone makes these kinds of basic errors--and asserts aggressively that Decadent is above and beyond--there's an intellectual catachresis that is at the very least troubling.
Should you be interested, you can find me rather easily via Google. My first ebook as the production lead was in 1989; by 1992 I was working for The Voyager Company, where we produced books by Douglas Adams, Michael Chrichton, Rick Smolan, Marge Piercy, Bill Gibson, and of course, the top 100 titles of The Modern Library.