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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
Shouldn't the headline read Publishers Admit Wikipedia is More Accurate Than Books?
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 didn't even have time to fact-check this reply!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Filing taxes is a big pain, too, so maybe I'll just give that one a miss this year and see how that turns out...
Have fun,
Nathan 'Nato' Uno
http://web.unos.net/
The only people who believed Frey wanted to be fooled: Glory to Dr. Dolan, as they say.
Screw honesty or even decent reporting - to hell with all that! It's too "costly". What happened to the day when it was more important to be right and honest than to sell tons of books/magazines/newspapers?
Disgusting...
My MythTV HowTo
The more people make a big deal of this guy, the more money he makes from publicity. Stop buying his stupid book.
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.
While I think the publishers of a scientific journal bare some responsibility when it turns out an article was entirely bogus I don't understand why people want to blame the publishers of an Autobiography.
Had the publishers known the book was faked, contrived or otherwise bogus they should have refused publishing it as an autobiography. I see no reason for them to go out of their way to prove, or disprove it though.
People take some things far too seriously.
I can't expect honesty from my nightly news let alone a biographical book.
Before anyone worries about the standards of Oprah's latest gem we should have something in place to hold "news" publicists/broadcasters responsible for their tripe.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
Of course it should be up to the author to decide whether his/her book is fiction or nonfiction, and that author should be held accountable for it. The publisher takes the risk of looking bad if they invest in a disreputable author. What's the problem here? Exactly how many people do you expect to hold your hand through life? Next we'll be quibbling over whether the Bible is fiction or non-fiction.
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/
This also must mean they also don't fact check the fiction!
There may very well have been popular works of fiction that may actually have been non-fiction! I bet if Smoking Gun digs a little, they might get something on Stephen King.
Hopefully people like Oprah will at least fact-check stuff before hanging their credibility out to dry.
Maybe they'll spell check too
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What do Americans think of seeking $50m in "damages" for the California resident who bought a copy of the book?
On the other hand, it's a damn good book, and wouldn't have been as good if I thought it was fake. My girlfriend's English professor went to college with him, and said that the guy was definately a tortured soul. When he spent that 2 nights in jail (which he claimed was 5 years in his book), it really tore him up; for him, it was 5 years.
Regardless, this didn't hurt his book sales too badly! It's still on the top 5 sellers list!
As far as publishers fact-checking: Do we really expect these guys to do this? That could take some digging for them, and we all know how publishers can be.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
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.
In other words, non-fiction books are a worse source of information than Wikipedia, which is constantly open to peer review (unlike dead tree media, which is unalterable once printed).
So, maybe now people constantly slamming Wikipedia for its lack of "fact checking" will stop?
It's only a matter of time before fact checking becomes a pay-for extra even in science journals.
I'm glad she tore into him; he deserved that. Still, why wasn't that her first reaction? What do women really want, then? The cynic in me says that when women complain about finding out that men aren't honest, they're not asking for us to be honest. They're asking us to be better at lying to them, and to create more perfect illusions. So do women want honesty, or do they just want a compelling storyteller- a guy who can tell her she's a princess (when she's not), and that he's Prince Charming (when he's not), and that her ass doesn't look big in those jeans (when it does)?
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?
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.
I find it quite irritating that some books are out to trick their readers, and there are many I'd prefer had never been written simply because it means I spend more time having to argue with and correct people on certain topics if they've been taking rubbish sources seriously. But the thought of non-fiction books having to be factually correct seems quite far-fetched. If publishers and authors could be sued for providing factually wrong books in a non-fiction category, then categories such as "New age" would be illegal, simply because authors who publish in them tend to be out to swindle their readers in one way or another by definition, and the publisher's probably in it for the sales. (Okay, I see New Age as fiction, but many book shops, publishers and people don't.)
Some of the best satire can come from effectively lying to an audience, and I don't see how you could cleanly distinguish it. Peter Jackson is just an example of someone who's done this, having faked an historical documentory (see Forgotten Silver) and lied about its origins to get it on TV. He had a lot of gullible people thinking they were seeing actual history, including the TV network, before he revealed it was all made up. What's the difference? Could he have been sued by the network? Possibly, but he took that chance and he wasn't, and now Forgotten Silver is considered a work of art.
As sad as I think it is that there are some really crappy books out there, and people who believe them, I'm not sure how rules could be made to fairly place responsibility on a publisher. Personally I think that fact checking should come from peers after publication, and it should be the responsibility of the reader to check if the facts have been checked. Hopefully anything that's actually important enough and relied on by enough people will have its facts checked, resulting in either confirmation, or a very embarassed author and publisher. There are always reputations to go on. In the case the article speaks of, the publisher is hopefully now being made to look more than a little stupid, and I'd like to think that Oprah's Book Club reputation is probably suffering a bit more than it was previously if its followers ever cared about this sort of thing. I've never followed her book club myself, but that's for good reason.
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.
Some books, well, you really have to wonder if they're actually intended to be non-fiction in the first place. Biographies - especially unauthorized ones - are sometimes pretty unbelievable. And sometimes you just have to wonder what the hell the editors (yes, plural) were thinking. At some point in time, you'd expect that common sense would kick in and they'd say "Oh come on, that can't be right..."
But no. Time after time, you see all manner of media go through at least three levels of possible sanity checking and bullshit filter, and still somehow the real stinkers get through.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It matters because the book was billed as an honest account of a serious addiction and how to get out of it. If people's view of addiction is twisted by misinformation, that can lead to misunderstandings and inappropriate methods of coping for addicts and their close ones.
Why, pray tell, did you happen to choose these particular examples? I'd almost suspect that you have a political axe to grind...especially since in your list of cases of "recent vintage" you left off several more compelling, more current, and more significant cases.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And before you start drawing unfounded conclusions about my politics, I happen to be a fiscally conservative registered Republican, who happens to hold my side to a higher standard than the "opposition". Where I was brought up, cheating to win meant you had lost, no matter what the scoreboard said.
Just as well they are fact checking the fiction books!
And perhaps even if it is? Read Navahoax: a story about a very similar situation as this one, where a writer made up supposedly nonfiction autobiographical accounts and was published (the publishers here also say we don't fact check such stories). The stories in this case do deal with child molestation, among other things, and while the stories are not accusations per se, one wonders about the implications of publishing material like this under false pretenses. I tend to agree that it doesn't make that much difference, since one can perhaps get greater truths from fictional works, and if the phony "memoirs" label makes it easier for some people to accept those truths, what's the harm? On the other hand, I would think a publisher should make it their business to know whether this was really a memoir or is a fictional memoir, since it is their decision to market the book a certain way. Of course, even in truthful autobiographies there will be exaggeration and writer's license to interpret things in various ways; I'm not sure there's always an easy line to draw between truth and fiction.
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".
If you had read it, you'd feel duped too.
"I'm glad she tore into him; he deserved that. Still, why wasn't that her first reaction? "
Why does anyone care about what Oprah does or thinks? I'm fascinated why anyone considers her more compelling or important than say, Madonna, Prince Charles, or Winnie the Pooh?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
If you had read it, you'd feel duped too.
This is slashdot. Even if you haven't read it, you'll feel duped in 48 hours.
When did you (or indeed anyone else) determine that there was a direct correlation between what women say they want, what they think they want (you know, deep down inside), and what they actually end up doing?
You have to realize: women and men don't speak the same language. Maybe we speak English, Spanish, German, Russian or what have you, but it dosen't matter where you are, all women speak Womanese. It's not that they're not being honest with you, it's that you're just not listening to what they're saying. When you ask for a number, and they ask for yours instead "because they don't have a phone", it means "Oh goody, another number to put in my showcase of losers so I can show the grandkids how hot grandma once was".
When they say "We need to talk" it means "I need to complain" When they say "Maybe", they mean "No." When they say "We were both wrong", they naturally mean "You were wrong, and if I have anything to do with you in ten years, I'm going to wave it in your face every chance I get!"
When they say "I like nice guys", it really means, "I want to go screw a biker!", and when they say "I don't want to date you because that would mess up our friendship" they really mean "You're nice, but you're a poor, ugly wuss and I'd rather talk to you about the bikers that will be gangbanging me later tonight."
The single biggest one though, and it's clearly the one you missed out on, when they say "Honesty is inportant to me!" they mean "Tell me only what I want to hear; I don't care if you've been with a three hundred women, I like you anyways (but I might not like you so much if you told me) just don't hurt my feelings."
This asshole's mistake wasn't only in not telling the truth, but it was not telling the truth to a vast audience, and misrepresenting reality on such a wide scale. If you're having an orgy on a lighted billboard that's surrounded by a million onlookers, it only stands to reason that you're going to get busted for it eventually. He and his publisher made their millions, and Oprah fans nationwide want to kick him in the nuts. I guess it all balances out.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I have always been a bigger fan of the opinions expressed by anonymous cowards.
so reprint the book saying it's fiction and tell anyone they can trade theirs in for a new "improved" copy. Then they can feel good about themselves.
Or just tell them to stay out of the history/real life sections of the book store if they might want to read something that hasn't been embellished one iota.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
Some articles not actually news for nerds or stuff that matters.
Have you seen what's being classified as non-fiction? I wish we can sue the garbage that's passed as non-fiction from both extremes. I'm sure the right-wing can spout stuff about Michael Moore's books, and Ann Coulter? Rush Limbaugh? John Gibson's War on Christmas??? Half lies (or half truths, it's the same thing!) to straight up lies. It's all fiction. Check out http://www.mediamatters.org/ and search for ann coulter or rush.
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.)
When asked to substantiate his claim that he "didn't have time to check [his] reply" the Slashdot poster known only as 'ewg' said, "Well, it's kind of like not being able to afford to", and quietly retired from public life, saying only that he (or she, or it) "Needed to spend more time on the talk show circuit".
When and if contacted for comment, Oprah Winfrey -- by her own account an "American TV presenter", whatever that may be, and who cares, and not me -- said she could neither confirm nor deny anything these days, that she preferred it that way, and that she read somewhere that 90% of facts may or may not be something-or-other, but we should love them JUST THE SAME.
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...)
Take Ann Coulter for instance. Her grasp of reality (or at least the difference between truth and fiction) is minimal at best.
I doubt that. I put Ann Coulter in the same bin as professional wrestlers. I have no doubt that Ms. Coulter is indeed a neoconservative (social conservative, fiscal liberal), but when she gets on TV and makes outrageous claims to tick some people off and gratify others, she is being an actor and an entertainer. The majority of what she says is extreme hyperbole. She can make a career off of exaggeration, and is doing exactly that.
Michael Moore does the same thing (though he tends to stick more to specifically attacking Bush and friends than Coulter, who has a habit of attacking this vast and twisted monster that she's built called "the liberal"). He's making a good living doing what he's doing.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
He lied about being involved in a fatal train accident that took the lives of two high school students. From The Smoking Gun:
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In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered.
He accuses their dead child of lying to them on the night she died....but, it's all in good fun.
He accuses the police officer who arrested him of beating him and abusing him. Not so: the officer was very kind in not reporting that Frey was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon when arrested:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/freysides/
Liars hurt a lot of people.
It has been pointed out that Frey's lies don't do seriously ill addicts a lot of good.
He apparently has a tattoo that says: FTBSITTTD Fuck The Bullshit It's Time To Throw Down
His story is bullshit. Of the above Pabst Blue Ribbon arrest, The Smoking Gun writes:
That episode--a violent, crack-fueled confrontation with Ohio cops that resulted in a passel of serious felony charges--is a crucial moment in "A Million Little Pieces," serving as a narrative maypole around which many other key dramatic scenes revolve and depend upon for their suspense and conflict. Frey has repeatedly asserted in press interviews that the book is "all true" and he told Winfrey, "I think I wrote about the events in the book truly and honestly and accurately."
The Smoking Gun's article is excellent:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061james
And, if you don't think the truth is important, you won't care the the Bush White House is trying to get a NASA scientist to shut up about global warming:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01
Doesn't matter; might be better if the NASA guy wrote a book describing how he singlehandedly "throws down" with a hurricane and kicks its ass. He'll make millions.
Martha Stewart spent more time in jail for lying than this guy did for his Pabst-crack fest...I suggest we put him in woman's prison. He'd be somebody's bitch no matter which gender prison they sent him to....
Along these lines, Ken Lay's trial has now begun. A theme of his defense is that he was just a good old boy who was misled by evildoers within Enron. Whether or not that's the case
Issues like this pop up fairly often. When does an individual obtain so much power and influence that it becomes not only irresponsible but legally actionable for that person to say "I was misled; and therefore misled you"? One could say, "well, we're all responsible for our own investments," and I guess that's true. All of us reading Slashdot are clearly SuperWise folk who assiduously manage our investments, balance our checkbooks, and clear the cookies out of our browsers every day. But our dear Grandma Gertrude,
In one extreme limit, we protect Grandma Gertrude by creating an oppressive nanny state, in which regulations are thick and heavy
What I am suggesting here is that it might be far more effective to "hang" Oprah --- to stomp her ratings, dent her popularity, deflate her ego --- than it would be to point out that the author of "million little pieces" is an exaggerator. Similarly, it might be more effective to toss Ken Lay in the brig than to contemplate a better regulatory regime.
Dear reading people of America,
We ask that you ignore our statement yesterday about "fact-checking [being] too costly" to do. As many have pointed out, it isn't expensive or hard at all to check your facts. In today's world there are many electronic solutions to these problems.
Once again, we apologize for misleading you, fact-checking is fairly cheap.
Yours Always,
Publishers Of America
(Not Affiliated With American Publishers)
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
I've got a lot to learn about women but I can't imagine lumping all females - nearly three billion of them - into one basket like this. Maybe many women want honesty, maybe some have other priorities. They're not a big club though, and they don't all think the same.
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.
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
"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?