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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."
AI programmers have another job to do.... since machine translation is moving along quite well, why not develop a fact checker based on a similar algorithm, that compiles things from various sources and then presents it to a human to do final checking?
-Palal
The "Million Little Pieces" incedent is minor as far as I am concerned. The lack of real fact-checking has gotten so bad that there is a whole industry of debunkers and debunker-debunkers. Take Ann Coulter for instance. Her grasp of reality (or at least the difference between truth and fiction) is minimal at best. A whole army of coulter-debunkers have grown up who devote time to debunking her claims (my favorite is The Daily Howler. In turn a whole army of Coulter Defenders has grown up to attack these debunkers.
At first I was annoyed by this phoenomenon, and then bored by it. Initally I assumed that the people who publish Coulter would care that her lies slandered their good name. And then I realized that they didn't care. They were making money off of her and the people both defending and attacking her. And, at the end of the day most people only believe those that say what they want to hear anyway.
While I was initially inclined to see this as bad publishing I now see this as a bigger problem.
From TFA
Late Friday afternoon, plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern said he filed a lawsuit against Random House and its Doubleday imprint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charging that the publishers misrepresented that book as nonfiction. His client, California resident Karen Futernick, alleges in the suit that she purchased "A Million Little Pieces" on that basis but that the defendants "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Mr. Bern said that he will seek more than $50 million in damages for the plaintiffs. "Nobody can get away with profiting with a product that you represented as something that it is not," says Alan Ripka, another partner in Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, the New York City law firm that filed the suit.
Ayup. $50 Million dollars because she bought a book marked as non-fiction that was actually fictional. If she ever went into the Boston Public Library, we could clear the national deficit just from the Natural Sciences section alone!
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Fortunate Son was withdrawn from the publisher because A.) The author was utterly unable to provide a single shred of proof for the only new, "bombshell" revelation in the book, i.e. that George W. Bush was once arrested for cocaine possession, and B.) The author turned out to be a liar and convicted felon. He was an ex-con on parole for attempted murder, had pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $34,000 in federal housing funds, none of which he happened to mention to St. Martin's while pitching the book. Plus he was caught making up stories about his background; as a science fiction writer, I especially liked the one about how he was recipient of "the prestigious international Isaac Asimov Foundation Literary Award for Outstanding Biography," which, oddly enough, doesn't exist.)
Michael Bellesiles' Arming America was another demonstrable (although initially more believable and well-crafted) fraud that argued gun ownership in early America was rare. Researchers following up on his work found that some of his source material said the exact opposite of what he claimed. That eventually got Bellesiles fired from his university position, and even had the Bancroft prize committee not only rescind the prize it had awarded him, but ask for the prize money back!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Hey slashdot readers -- follow the link in parent! This guy is Hil-arious!
A snippet: "At first I was puzzled by the fact that most of Frey's fans were women. Once again, I was deluded by all that Berkeley nonsense, assuming that women would object to the gross misogyny in Frey's novels, his habit of killing off women characters for cheap tears, his atavistic Hemingway swagger, his inevitable conclusion (in My Friend Leonard) that chicks are chapters while men are books-that only homoerotic friendships between Manly Men are truly worthy."
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
What do Americans think of seeking $50m in "damages" for the California resident who bought a copy of the book?
Oprah ran lies about Hurricane Katrina on her show and she never retracted them. She allowed Mayor Ray Nagin on September 5th claim that "They're murdering people in there (the Superdome)." Louisiana National Guard and State health department officials said no one had been murdered inside the stadium. So what's worse? A book about an addict that was spiced up or a public official using Oprah's airwaves to promote false news to a nation that public policy might have been based off?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I will forgo the usual bad joke for this thought:
Someone should pick this up as an opportunity to create a commercial certification such as in MSA, UL, or to a much less and more stupid extent, A+. e.g. Certified to be factual by Sarlon (its made up I hope). With that they get the right to put the big ol' Sarlon stamp on the cover and in the publishers disclaimer.
As with all certifications, whose without are obviously sub-par and not to be trusted.
I am only partially joking.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Well if Ann Coulter can go to press with a book claiming that the NY Times didn't acknowledge the death of Dale Earnhard Jr. and the Bush Whitehouse lets in a Fake News agency to punt easy questions what more can be expected?
Does it matter if a memoir is faked? If it's not doing things like falsely accusing someone of being a child molester, what the fuck does it really matter?
Boo hoo a lot of housewives were duped.
I'm sure someone will mod this down as a troll, but besides some fucked up sense of security, what was harmed?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
This comment is funny, but unfortunately true. I have nothing against Wikipedia, but being a college student, I find myself going to Wikipedia to get information over my textbooks. Does it make sense to find my $200(USD) textbooks less informative and less accurate than a free website which is more like an informative graffiti board?
I mean, come on, publishers. What are you doing with my $200 dollars? Last term alone I paid over $600 to book publishers, and you're telling me you can't guarantee their accuracy with this? That's sadly pathetic. I could hire someone to read the text for accuracy myself after a few terms making this kind of money.
just take Gulliver's Travels, for example. It was originally published as Non-fiction travel literature. Come on, did you really think publishers really planned on going to see if 6inch Liliputian people and horse-people Houyhnhnms really existed? No, Swift's claims were so unbelievable people probably thought they had to be believable. Not to say that anyone bought his stories while they were published as non-fiction, but it doesn't come as much of a surprise that publishers wouldn't check facts.
Well, oddly enough, "The Truth About Hillary", a book that describes Hillary Clinton as a lesbian, has not been pulled off of shelves. Neither has that Swift Boat Veterans book about Kerry. It seems that certain lies are more bothersome to certain people.
If you want to read a good book by a liar and a convicted felon, I hear G. Gordon Liddy has a new one coming.
Here's his original review of the book, which is also quite amusing: Clicky!
The Exile's a pretty good read overall.
Isn't the point of textbooks to present information in a way that makes it easy to learn? You sound like you want a reference manual, which is something completely different (and probably cheaper)
Le français vous intéresse?
Tell me about it. Once while in grad school I paid $85 for a shiny new textbook for a topology course. After thumbing through it for a couple of hours, I realized that it had less information than a Dover paperback topology text I had previously purchased for $7. I returned that new piece of crap for a full refund, and copied the homework problems from a classmate. I passed with an A.
Madonna
Because Madonna keeps reinventing herself too much to keep a consistent fan base (she has always been able to keep a large fan base though). In addition Madonna doesn't seem nearly as active in confronting issues of every day Americans and increasing the literacy of average Americans.
Prince Charles
Unlike Charles she wasn't born into success, and not only did she work her way to where she is now but she did it while being black and a woman. She was born to an unmarried coal miner and housemaid and went from that to being a media mogul and controlling top selling book lists.
Winnie the Pooh
Unlike Winnie, she exists. Also she in not a Pooh, and I have yet to know someone that can relate to a Pooh better then another human.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Two things...
1) It's amazing how hard core socialist, leftist professors suddenly turn hard core capitalist and require you to purchase their $85 book.
2) I had one of those classes and the professor -never even referred to the damn book one time all semester-.
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After a couple semesters of this, I started xeroxing the books in the school library (5 cents a copy- 2 pages a copy- about $12 to $15 to copy a $85 book.
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I think that the professors should create a wiki for each class- let anyone update it- they have editorial control (and the history is available too- plus you have folks log in). Then the cost to students would be free for most books (print out the few pages you actually need hard copy).
I suppose I wouldn't begrudge the hard core capitalist professors insisting on hard books at high profits (tho I'd copy those too)- but it doubly galls me that a socialist type who insists I should give tax money to support everything is such a hypocrite when it comes to their own property and money.
Now that I'm out of school for quite a while, I firmly believe that it is a ripoff of the worst order on a portion of society that is least able to afford the cost. We are ripping off our children and putting them into poverty.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Modern (US style) socialism doesn't say you should not earn a lot of money. It says you should pay enough taxes to cover the needs of the less fortunate (and the military, farmers, loggers, miners, ranchers etc).
So the professors are practicing what they preached. They are earning money and they are paying taxes.
I think you confused your socialist teachers with budhist teachers. Budhists believe in a life lived simply and humbly without accumulating wealth. Christ tought the same thing but christians as a general rule do not follow that bit of advice from him.
evil is as evil does
Leaving aside the annoying "socialist" claptrap, you mention being annoyed because a professor 1) required you to buy their own text; and then 2) didn't use the text.
I find it hard to believe that both of these things happened in the same course. Why would an instructor ignore a text they wrote themselves?
At any rate, professors ignoring texts is too common at the univ. where I teach. This is a direct and predictable result of the administration's policies: instructors can no longer pick whatever textbook they like. The school has standardized that choice for us. Sometimes there is only one "choice." Hurray for economies of scale! (A dogmatic zealot might scream at the "capitalist" corruption of academic freedom here... but that would simply be an annoying simplification likely to elicit cries of "socialist" from someone equally knee-jerked.)
The most serious issue in the classroom is the ridiculously high price of college textbooks. An interesting issue, but not directly related to the discussion of fact-checking or accuracy. Other than the fact that when you pay such a high price for something, you want it to be perfect.
In my view, though, it's fair for publishers to insist that the author carry the burden of fact-checking; Particularly for textbooks, that's where the expertise lies: with the author. If the books are error-ridden, then instructors (or administrators) won't continue using them. Thus the publisher has an incentive to work with reliable authors who error-check.
Some things cannot be fact-checked in any worthwhile way. Their power to move us is precisely that they are an "imaginative re-creation" of something that happened, and by this they show us a greater spiritual or emotional truth than the bald facts baldly stated. On the basis of literal, scientific truth, I'm afraid that any publisher's fact-checker would be duty-bound to reject the US Constitution and demand cuts or rewriting of 90 per cent of the New Testament, including the retitling of the Letters of St Paul to "Letters by an Unknown Author". The miracle of the feeding of the 5000, for example, cannot literally be true, but to its original listeners the story would have contained some very powerful truths.
I'm not sure which is the more nauseating. That the Opera crew (and sundry attorneys and greed-crazed readers) should have failed to notice that "A Million Little Pieces" could not possibly be true in any literal way; or that having had this pointed out to them, they should blame others for their own stupidity then seek to profit from it.
I doubt we'll hear Oprah calling up an archbishop and demanding the withdrawal of the New Testament any time soon. Maybe, shock horror, the world of 2000 years ago had a much more sophisticated understanding of truth and fiction that we do today.
FWIW, I didn't think much of "A Million Little Pieces". It fails to engage. And, yes, publishers are mostly a two-faced, puffed-up crowd, prattling about literature while paying freelance editors and proofreaders not much more than burger-flipping rates then blaming them for foobars that a Harvard professor might easily have missed.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Because if they didn't have to pay for the creation of the material, you believe they would pay for the fact checking? Or perhaps there would be a more expensive version, "with fact checking"? Take away the IP protection and the publisher has no choice but to create content the cheapest way possible, and that means no fact checking, accepting content from those willing to pay to get their viewpoint out, etc. Tales of how much better the middle ages would be with a Coke, how the Black Death could have been solved with Pfizer pharmaceuticals, how Goodyear helped turn the tide in WWII
The details you are so short sightedly missing is that it is a free market, there are dozens of textbooks on every subject a professor can choose to teach his course from, and that the only thing IP laws grant a monopoly on is the particular arrangement of words and pictures in a given book.If a professor believes a $20 book has as much detail, useful exercises, accurate facts, etc. versus a $40 book, he is free to select it. If you believe he is making poor decisions by selecting a more expensive book, you can complain to the university and/or take your tuition elsewhere. If you believe you can learn everything you need to know from Wikipedia and the library, you can keep it in your pocket even.
My other car is a Popemobile
"Having sole rights to a particular work doesn't really make a monopoly except in a rediculously narrow view."
The breadth of a monopoly is dependent on the product specification, not on any specific inherent breadth attribute.
For example, a monopoly on aluminium is not a monopoly on construction materials. It is nevertheless a monopoly, and the economic effect remains in effect. The aluminium does not get produced and sold at the most competetive and economically efficient price. Any and all products whose specifications require actual aluminium will inherit the inefficiencies, and the total wealth of the economy will be lower than what it would have been if the aluminium had been competetively produced. There's less economic damage than if someone had had a monopoly on all construction materials, but the damage remains.
The money spent paying for the monopoly derived higher costs would otherwise have been spent in other parts of the economy.
"Free market does not prevent other publishers and authors from making similar books that teach the same thing with equivalent words and pictures."
Unless they for all intents and purposes can replace the original for the consumer, and are not themselves subject to the same monopoly inefficiencies, that doesnt remove the economic damage.
Lets play a mind game. Take that $200 book and calculate the cheapest way it could possibly have been produced. Allow factors that some consumers would have been satisfied with downloading the text, others would have wanted it in paper, but would have been satisfied with lower quality paper and black/white printing only. Say, maybe on average the cost would fall to maybe $5-$20 per copy. Now take those $180 and multiply it by the number of copies sold and insert that into the economy as money available to purchase other items instead.
Now, from that little mind game, extrapolate to the entire intellectual monopoly business and calculate the total loss to the economy.
"but you seem to advocate stripping them of that priviledge."
Not really. I advocate subjecting the intellectual monopoly segments to the same free market rules that everyone else has to live with, because the damage caused by monopolistic exceptions is too large and will only grow in the future.
That's not necessarily incompatible with authors having a certain amount of control, or getting paid for their work. For a wild example of how one compatible system could work; instead of monopoly control, authors (and anyone else involved in the production) could get attritbution credits, which would then pay out on a per-person-copy basis over a certain amount of time. You could write a book, anyone copying or printing it would simply note that a copy for them was made, and you could claim a check for the number of copies made. Financing of the system could be through a printing tax or system of your choice; if the price of a book falls from $200 to $20, I suspect we could afford a small cost there.