Second guessing

I've been having an odd email exchange with someone. His replies seem to have an intangental relation to what I'm trying to convey. So, for example, I originally asked whether he would consider contributing a single paper to an academic journal that would form the basis of a forum where other people would then comment on the paper. He replied that he'd be delighted to put together a special issue consisting of several full papers. It was a couple of days until I replied as I was travelling, so I started by apologising for the delay and then explained that I wasn't looking for several papers but just a single one. His response was to say he was looking forward to my reply when I got the chance. I think he's just skimming the first line of my emails, guessing the rest and replying. It's kind of annoying as I have to start all of my responses by correcting his misreading.

Anyway, this has got me to think about backcover blurbs as I think the same phenomena might be happening with them. There have been a few books I've read recently where the blurb seems tangentally related to story the book tells or has fairly basic factual errors. My sense is that they have been written by someone who has at best skim read the book or wrote it after an editor tried to describe it to them after a few drinks down the pub. Some of the backcover blurbs for my academic books have been awful and I now insist on writing them. I guess what I'm wondering is, 1) who writes these blurbs and are they expected to have actually read the book? 2) do authors get to see them, and if so, why don't they get them altered?