Wow. Generally we used to release few books per year only for this reason. Each book and each author needs attention and we care a lot about focusing on details. (This is a little bit more difficult when we had to coordinate many authors on one book. Thank god, we had SVN).
We do totally agree with you. Every publisher has different priorities: the previous owner aimed only to "make money" in a "super-simple-way" aka do not pay freelancers, authors unless they start to mention legal way.
Let us guess the company you applied for your book, Apress?
We were another little publishing house that released two, three technical books per year. Unfortunately, due to the previous owner, we made many errors (such as investing time and resources into a project that we found was a scam) and we lost part of our readers. Our former business was really a pain, tons of people high-paid only to waste time on stupid books. Economic crisis of 2008 and 2011 in Italy contributed to this and we losted earnings.
I am one of the previous employee and after a discussion with the former owner, we got the rights to redistribute the content. The old company was removed, and all the employee (10) were fired.
Currently we are focusing on re-editing our books and developing a solid business plan. We know it's a little bit ambitious to say pioneer, but we were one of the first technical publishing houses to release digital content in the early 90s (in Italy).
P.S.: We are still trying to fix some issues on responsiveness (CSS).