I don't think it's common. I've wondered for a long time why every time I try to process or edit an IA book scan - and only IA book scans - they come out bizarr

I don't think it's common. I've wondered for a long time why every time I try to process or edit an IA book scan - and only IA book scans - they come out bizarrely mangled and broken and inconsistent across viewers (and have mostly given up using them and scanning books myself), slow and surprisingly bulky compared to normal JBIG2-compressed JPEG PDFs. OP's observations about the unreliability and inconsistency of JPEG2k across tools would explain all of this...