Judging by the deplorable quality of the editing and cover illustrations on many Kindle books, I question whether the traditional publishers are adding anything of value. Oftentimes it's obvious that the cover illustration was tossed together in Photoshop or Illustrator in an afternoon, and the editing wouldn't pass muster in a freshman composition class. Sometimes it doesn't look like they've even bothered to run the spell-checker.
This doesn't excuse the editing, but I've heard that one problem is that publishers often don't have electronic rights to use the cover illustrations they use on physical books.
