Lots of excellent information in this thread already. I was just lurking and thought I would chime in on this. I own a tech consulting business, and one of the things we do quite commonly is web design work. The area I focus on personally is back-end development (PHP/MySQL/CGI). Most of the design work on the pages I do is all sub-contracted out to other firms, for many of the reasons already mentioned in this thread.
I agree with absolutely everything the other designers/developers have already said. I think that's a very accurate description of the industry, and it's shortcomings.
Price wise, I would expect a site like this to run $1000-$2000 from a freelance designer. Through a design firm this figure would easily be $6000. Most firms that do good work won't even look at anything less than that. Really it's because there's no margins there. There's so much overhead involved in coming up with a design plan, setting up a development environment, registering all the domains, setting up the servers, beta testing, editing, et cetera.
Quality wise, I think the site is not terrible. The only glaring downfall to the site is the poor navigation and paypal purchasing system. Without being involved in the design process, it's impossible to fault of the designer. It's extremely common for a client to demand certain features or design elements, despite the designers strong recommendations against it.
That said, there are some faults that I would've never let slip by any website I offered to a client. I'll enumerate them to save time, since this post is getting pretty long.
- Sites intended to market and sell things to an online market need to be SEO (search engine optimization) compliant. This website uses old fashioned style tables to align elements, image based navigation, no alt text for images, contains no site map and uses old meta keywords. It's basically the definition of hard to crawl, hard to index and will guarantee your site is at a disadvantage over other sites when searched.
- Paypal check out is good to have as an alternative, but not as the primary handler of your merchant services. Many buyers don't have Paypal accounts, and nobody ever sees the "continue" link that is purposely kept small and nearly invisible. If this is a book, talk to the publisher about getting it into major stores and their websites. A link to Amazon would be the way to go. I know writers who have dozens of books on Amazon, with a lifetime sales total of 10. So it must be a simple process.
- The site uses PNG images. This is really a compatibility issue, since Internet Explorer doesn't properly support PNG until version 7, which is an optional upgrade on most computers. Limited support is provided, but I've seen IE do some strange things with PNGs. Browser statistics shows that 20% of internet users are still using IE6, so this is a fairly significant issue.
- Old style "mouseOver" javascript navigation menus, and table based organization lead to future problems with maintenance. Modern style designs utilize a more logical representation between the code and what will actually be displayed by the browser.
These are just the issues that I would call "medium interest."