Argyll, Smashwords, and their ilk are self-publishing platforms. Think fanfic and the like. The author is ultimately responsible for everything. The publishers offer services in the $10-$50 range for style-setting an entire book, and you get what you pay for.

Example: https://www.smashwords.com/list

Unless there's something I'm missing, Argyll is a small press. Smashwords is more like a vanity press, which is what you describe. There's a huge difference between those two kinds of publishers, even if both give authors more responsibility than a traditional publisher.

"Self-publishing" is really orthogonal to both of those, though today most people would probably describe any vanity press as effectively self-published.

now, if the author would use pandoc he'd get that for free and noone had to do the menial work.

I’ve bought several of the authors published and self published ebooks, and they’re all generally done to a professional standard. I know that she uses freelance copy editors for the self published stuff.

In this case, (further down the thread) it was a dialect thing, so the whole problem was a false positive from an over zealous automated system on Christmas Eve, in prime panic ebook gifting time.

well, it was not about the case, but about the thriving service sector in GPs-link, where people are offering the service of formatting word-files for e-book export. Considering that self-publishing is probably in the 20$-wage-range, the authors could easily learn pandoc+git (or just use MS Word the right way), save that money for subsequent books AND (which is the most important thing) should have a workflow in place, where they actually can check for previous version/can edit the published version easily.

God forbid somebody with non-technical interests wants to write a book without first learning a bunch of nerd shit.

The majority of authors today don't know that software named pandoc exists, let alone what it does, let alone what it might do for them.

"But I don’t want to go among nerds,” HN user catalogia remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all nerds here. I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd.” “How do you know I’m a nerd?” said they. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Don't get me wrong, I like and use pandoc. But it's not the sort of tool anybody should expect the average author to be aware of. Maybe if it had a GUI it'd be more reasonable to expect the general public to use it.

well, it's text-editor based and scores of people worked with similar systems successfully without being a nerd before Microsoft and IBM started to push for WYSIWIG because you could sell a new UI for that every year or two (and now the same people are selling SaaS because people stopped taking the bait...). Efficiency gains for actual users: noone knows, but people are making a lot of money, so it has to be something.