E-Book Design from PW

he most striking thing from PW’s article on e-book design today?  This quote from Andy Hughes, vice president of production and design at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group:

“Preparing a good e-book file, he says, is ‘like making a gourmet meal out of leftovers.’”

What on earth does that even mean?  Do the words that make up the book somehow become stale between print production and electronic production?  Publishers attitudes about e-books in general seem to baffle me (see the article below for more of this), but this brings me to a new level of confusion.