… Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of fulltime copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone. There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house [...]
Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit—his thorough, intricate takedown of Greg Mortenson’s fraudulent book and charity—has been downloaded 70,000 times by users of byliner.com. That’s terrific news in more ways than one. The problem is, Mortenson’s first book sold more than four million copies. Math isn’t my strongest suit—that would be my reasoned, measured approach [...]
From the Onion (I neglected to put this up last week): It pains me to point out that we recently published an item that should never have been published. A recent installment of Comics Panel featured a review of the book Genius Isolated: The Life & Art Of Alex Toth. This afternoon, a reader contacted [...]
While you’re here, please consider purchasing a copy of the Regret the Error book, which won an award for media criticism from the National Press Club, and also contains hundreds of hilarious corrections. You can learn more about the book and read some reviews here. The paperback edition includes a new introduction. Error of the [...]
This charming video features Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles performing a piece dedicated to errors and corrections (click on the empty space below if it's not displaying properly): Thanks to Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, for sending it along. Report an error
A report that was recently published in Weekly Book News (Australia) detailed a typo that caused a cookbook to be pulped: Penguin pulped 7000 copies of the Pasta Bible (ISBN 9780143011071) earlier this month due to a typo that could be considered offensive … New stock will be available from mid-May. [Sally] Bateman said this [...]
By John E. McIntyre When Waldo Jaquith of The Virginia Quarterly Review discovered and published that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, had plagiarized passages from Wikipedia in his new book, Free, it provoked a lively, and sometimes alarming, discussion of plagiarism. Regret the Error has summarized the affair, and there are extensive comments on [...]
The new book from Wired editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson contains multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. The examples of plagiarism were discovered by a reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review and Anderson admits that he failed to properly attribute the text. Here’s how he explained himself: As some of you may have seen, VQR [...]
The folks at Writer’s Digest have a new guide to go along with their Writer’s Market series of books and services. Details are here, but the cover says it all. Get yours today! Report an error
This story has already blown up, but here is the official Times Editors’ Note: The Books of The Times review in The Arts on Feb. 26 and an article in House & Home on Thursday described the experiences of Margaret B. Jones, who said that she had been a foster child and gang member in [...]
This was a book developed by the Boston Globe. Background here. Thanks, MJ! Report an error
