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Publishers Say 'Fact-Checking Too Costly'
Mr. Ghost writes "Members of the book publishing industry say that profit margins are too small to fact check "non-fiction" books. Instead they rely on the "honesty" of the authors submitting the book. This has come to a head with the revelation from the author of "Million Little Pieces" that he lied about the accounts in his memoirs."
Standard author contract says that the author warrants that their writing is original, factual, etc... and that the author will pay for as many lawyers that the publisher feels their need should there be legal trouble. So there's not a lot of risk for th publisher, and not a huge amount of incentive to spend a lot of effort fact checking. There's still the risk that the author goes bankrupt, and the publisher is back to paying for their own lawyers still, I suppose.
My publisher does some checking for plagarism, since that has come up a couple of times.
I don't know about yours, but my mother taught me not to believe everything I read / hear / see on TV.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
None of the four you mention as alternatives have had a book they wrote pulled by the publisher because of inaccuracies in it. Both of the books in the parent comment have been. That's why "those" examples.
Or to make it a single result with a nifty flash anim, GoogleFight. :)
Bored With ProgressQuest?
I read both "A Million Pieces.." and "My Friend Leonard", and even while holding my cynicism in check, found too much that just didn't pass the sniff test. For the publisher to not bother checking the more glaringly "off" sections, was at best a stupendous display of poor judgement and incompetence. Furthermore, keep in mind that Frey's agent shopped the book around to different publishers in some cases as "Fiction" and in others as "Memoir".
Richard Dawkins, the well-known Oxford biologist, has been pushing for this lately. His two-hour series on Channel 4 in Britain, investigates religion the way 60 Minutes investigates scams. Part I, "The God Delusion", includes a visit to a US megachurch in which the interviewer asks the preacher some tough questions. He also visits Lourdes, and asks questions about the reported miracle cure rate and the types of miracles recorded. It's consumer activism applied to religion.
(The audio of the show is available on the site above, and plays fine. The video is available on BitTorrent but seems to have some formatting problems.)
A friend of mine had a story published recently in the New Yorker -- a *fictional* story, about a street family sniffing glue (among other things) in Nairobi, Kenya. They ran into problems with it for awhile during the editing process because it was difficult for them to verify that the slang, the setting, the food, everything -- was valid and realistic. Was the brandname of glue actually available in Nairobi? Etc.. He would find them contacts who turned out to be basically unreachable, etc. etc..
True, this is *fiction* -- but the quality of that kind of story depends partly on its realism, so they needed to check.
I was surprised to hear about the difficulty of the process, but pleased as well that they do put the time into these details. (Now if only their taste in fiction always matched up better with mine...)
You have a very cynical view of the world. Women are just like you: They'd rather avoid a confrontation and hurt feelings than be brutally honest. What you call womaneese I call the univeral language of a polite letdown. Trust me, they are doing you a favor by not crushing you, or even worse, leading you on.
They want what you want as well: Excitement, passion, and someone they can respect. Would you want a woman who is affraid to tell you what they think? Would you want a woman who thinks sex is somthing incredibly important, and that they would never suggest it because doing so might offend you? Would you want a woman who has no self identity?
When you see a woman dating an asshole it's usually because they want a middle ground and haven't found it. It's possible they don't even know what they are looking for. It's your job to take a chance. Put the hand on the shoulder. Tell a few jokes. Offer to help her with somthing midly sexual, and see if she takes you up on it (You're going to change? Need a hand?) Take a chance!
The best thing you can do is try to act like an "asshole" because you'll realize that it doesn't work.
Are there big differences between men and women? Sure.
But you and me baby aint nothing but mammals.
It's partially due to the fact that the professors are more pressed for being published and thus have to keep writeing papers (to prove they keep "up to date" and in the know) instead of being useful and writeing thier own manuals/books for the classes. The schools could charge more for the class that way and circumvent the publishers entirely. You can really guage how good a Uni is when it's professors don't even use the books students are supposed to buy (or barely touch them) or if the professor provides you with thier own materials. My Japanese teacher is actually getting to the point finally that shes finally going to create her own manual. Partialy because the book is about 50% useful, but mostly because the book & workbook just cost too damn much anymore (used to be $70 for both and still are online, but at the school it's $130 & keeps going up).
Accountancy rules are incredibly complicated, and as a result, allow distortions to be created. When a rule is complicated, the number of people who are likely to understand it is less than if the rule is simple. These experts are then typically employed by large corporations and accountancy firms, in part because they want to ensure compliance, but also because they want the accounts to tell the best story.
Accounts are often not a true reflection. A lot of companies hit the wall after a few years of good accounts. The accountants broke no rules, but instead had made them look as good as possible by using the rules to their advantage.
Savvy businesspeople will tell you to "look behind the accounts" because they know what a distortion they can be, and yet they are presented as a government-approved view of a public company. The only way this will change is if the rules are made simple in terms of what you can do in a company, and how accounts are reported.
"That's the essential difference between a free market and a monopoly. In a free market, competition will set the price near the cost of producing the book."
In all actuality, this is NOT a monopoly situation, it a case of free market economics interfacing with copyright law. A teacher has to choose a single book, which is protected under copyright, once that is chosen, there are no alternatives. This might result in a textbook having a higher cost than anticipated, but I doubt it. The professor, however, has no incentive to choose the lowest cost book, but the one that conveys the information she or he desires best (or, if you're a cynic, the one that re-imburseses him best), but in any case, there are plenty of options available, all clammoring, in a free market, for the right to be represented in that classroom.
Since I work in academia, let me state this for the record: The cost of textbooks is not a result of the publisher's desire to screw the student (at least not in the biological and physical sciences), it is due to the free-market ownership of individual photographs or charts, which must be paid for by the publisher for the right to publish it.
Additionally, I'd like you to consider that each textbook you buy is at least 300 pages of color printing.
hmmmm?