“Books are less trustworthy in an era when anyone can publish electronically or on paper. What’s more, even major publishing houses can skimp on fact-checking — one more reason why we need librarians to help smarten up digital-era readers.” This they tell us at the Library Endowment website.
Well I can see how you might want to make this argument in favor of ensuring universal access to libraries and expert librarians. If we can’t trust what we hear or read, then obviously being able to have access to reliable sources of information becomes even more important.
However have books really become less trustworthy in our digital age? Worriers about Wikipedia wonder about its accuracy — though it’s so easy to correct that I suspect any inaccuracies must be short-lived. We know there’s lots of wrong info on the web, but there’s almost always a correct version lurking at the next search result. Google is daily giving us an education on critical intelligence and error detection. And of course plenty of old books contain plenty of wrong information. For example Richard Hakluyt writes in his The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) about “people without heads, called Blemines, having their eyes and mouth in their breast”. We do not believe him, I think, though Sir Walter Raleigh confirms the “fact”, which dates back at least to Herodotus.
The suggestion that publishers “can skimp on fact-checking” is strangely enough another example of a false belief based on print communication. In fact publishers don’t employ fact checkers at all (well, except for the rarest of occasions, when they may hire a freelancer to check things on a special project)— only The New Yorker does regular fact-checking. If a book contains potentially dangerous information the publishers will (one hopes) print a disclaimer in the front pointing out that they don’t really know what’ll happen if you follow the advice in their book. But they will not regard it as their obligation to check that all’s well. The correctness of the facts in a book is the responsibility of the author — and the author’s contract will contain an indemnity clause holding the publisher free and blameless in this regard. The publisher might in a particularly risky instance hire an outside expert to read the manuscript, but there might well be a subsequent effort to bill this cost to the author.
In a world, however, where only a sixth of the books published in any year is published by traditional publishers, the claim advanced by Library Endowment comes across as a bit of a slur on self-published books. Obviously self-published books are not subjected to the gatekeeping function which traditional publishing is often criticized for applying. If you make the assumption that traditional publishers are guaranteeing the accuracy of their books, then this might look like a bit of a red flag. However, when you accept that the “fact checkers” employed by traditional publishers are exactly the same individuals as the fact checkers employed by indie publishers — i.e. the authors themselves — then the distinction melts away. In fact the rate of error in books is probably pretty much the same today as it was a hundred years ago. It may be a little bit better than it was two or three hundred years ago. It’s almost certainly better than it was five or more centuries ago. This might be thought of as an embarrassment for book publishing, but I guess it’s not a big enough one for the industry to feel it has to do anything about it. As ever, caveat emptor.
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* The Pajama Game, for anyone who cares.
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Making Book 
It’s gratifying to see you defend indie-published books, Richard, and I’d agree that many of them equal or surpass those from the majors. For fact-checking my forthcoming SF adventure novella, the fictitious memoir of an ex-child soldier turned tycoon-philanthropist, I hired not one but two smart people based in Kinshasa. One was a former Mandela Fellow, and they were not free. Yes, just to be clear, I’ll self-publish.
Still, despite all the quack diet guides and semi-fictitious campaign bios from big houses, I would argue that the major publishers like PRH imprints on the whole have a better track record than indie-publishers on accuracy matters. They have more resources, whether for formal fact-checkers or not. A veteran computer consultant, for example, scrutinized every sentence of a Ballantine book I wrote called The Silicon Jungle (a mix of Silicon Valley history and computer tips). That said, I still think that the big houses should do a lot more fact-checking, especially on big-advance books.
As for librarians, the good ones can spot well-done books whether they’re from indie publishers or from the majors. Ideally, too, they can help spare us malarkey from QAnon conspiracy nuts and the like, as well as less obvious frauds. Best for everyone, editors, librarians and readers, not to “trust her” (enjoyable Pajama Game clip, by the way).
Wikipedia? Thumbs up! Expert editors are monitoring changes that readers make. Wikipedia isn’t infallible, but it’s certainly much better than the critics make it out to be.
Accuracy of books compared to the 16th century? Definite progress. But here we’re talking about a much-shorter timeline. Of course, one never knows about those headless people with “eyes and mouths in their breast.” Maybe true? I’m fully confident that QAnon can help us get to the bottom of this.
Thanks,
David
David H. Rothman
Co-founder, LibraryEndowment.org
davidrothman@pobox.com
Your experience on fact checking looks exceptional. Of course a copyeditor who happens to knows a bit about a subject may well catch a factual error or two, and academic books will have been read by a couple of subject experts who it will be assumed will have pointed out any mistakes. But formal fact checking is the exception. You have clearly done your bit in this regard.
There are endless bad books published within my area of baseball history. The absolute worst, comically bad of the lot of them is by a professor at an excellent liberal arts college and published by an Ivy League press. Frankly, any editor with general knowledge should have spotted red flags in the footnotes alone. The notion that this had been read by multiple subject experts is implausible, unless these experts were soundly ignored. Reading the book was quite enlightening about academic presses, though not about baseball history.
Oops. It’s no extenuation but might one suspect that this university press regarded baseball as somehow less “important” than say physics or philosophy, and thus gave the book less serious attention. Of course maybe they consulted “experts” who didn’t know what they were talking about. Another indication perhaps of arrogance in the face of what an academic might regard as relaxation rather than work!
You likely are right. There are honorable exceptions, but the tendency of baseball books by academics is “I am a baseball fan. I have a Ph.D. ‘Nuff said!” The resulting books are larks that might even pad the C.V. What struck me is that an Ivy League press let this through, clearly regarding it the same way. For context, the sources include (going from memory) an undated brochure by the Hoboken tourism bureau. Mind you, this is not to document what the tourism bureau claimed, but to document the claims themselves.
The same author has two previous books from the same press, on much more mainstream humanities topics. I have not read either, but my guess is that they are fine, and that the author used the relationship to get the baseball book through without close examination.
There are academic presses that take this stuff seriously. University of Nebraska is the most notable example. Perhaps this is really about my naively being impressed by the Ivy League. Live and learn.
Oh, and there isn’t really any reason for me to be discreet about what book I am talking about: https://cup.columbia.edu/search-results?keyword=jay+martin
I don’t think that there’s anything to be gained by my talking to CUP, but maybe it would be worth your writing to them — university presses do make corrections when (and if) their books reprint. I do think they’d rather know than remain in ignorance. Eric Schwartz is the head of editorial.