Comment by stogot
5 hours ago
> Nonfiction books are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance.
Do they believe someone cannot lie because it’s written down in a paperback? Authors lie in books and books do nothing to help someone who “embraces” ignorance
They can lie, but that lie will remain in the books that have gone into circulation. A lie on the internet can be reversed or erased after it has been consumed by millions of human eye balls.
Which is why the Internet Archive, and similar, more specialized services are so important.
We generally consider it a good thing that written falsehoods can be amended to instead say the truth. That's what we do with book errata and editions too.
The bigger issue is the attempt to rewrite history as if the falsehood was never there, which is in my opinion a much bigger lie. As I see it, this can be handled by third party archives and by us as a society actually attaching repercussions to such outright lying.
This was dead, I vouched for it, I think it's a good point. Form does not determine the truthfulness of content.
It does nod in its direction, though. Or at least it used to. Mass production printing was high overhead, and publishers had reputations to protect. That wasn't perfect but they'd usually try to avoid the worst propaganda.
(Or at least shove it off onto an imprint with less of a reputation. Or into a category, like Self Help, where people know its shaky relationship to truth.)
It was far from perfect. But these days the publishing gatekeepers have largely lost the battle. People prefer the hot takes they get from tv and social media.
From what I've heard through self-publishing media, nowadays, traditional publishing isn't even particularly disposed towards pushing back on things like these. They might even be all for publishing works based on outright lies if there's an existing customer base with open wallets.
Supposedly traditional publishing has become more and more conservative (not necessarily politically) with the risks they take on things they publish, so they'd be less likely to push back against widely-held ideas that are outright wrong. They'll really only publish authors with an established following or works that have a large base of interested consumers.
Edit: I just wanted to add that since I've heard these things so much, going to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble feels super weird. The books look nice, but they're all expensive and I have no sense that the selection has been curated for genuine quality or informational content. It's just what happens to being published now.
I greatly prefer the experience of going to thrift stores like Goodwill where the selection is chaotic, there's no real expectation of curation aside from maybe broad categories, and the books are gloriously cheap. You can find great stuff there!
The author clearly means professional publishers, who have editors and fact-checkers. Self-published books already lack trust. The reply also misses several other points the author makes, which I find ironic because it kind of goes into the direction the author bemoans: The author wrote a longer article to lay out his thoughts and it sure took him time to write and any reader time to read and digest and here is a quick oneliner as a rebuttal that took no time and effort and is superficial.
Do publishers really have fact-checkers? My understanding was that support for authors is now relatively minimal, even for established authors, and no one really has the time or resources to second-guess everything an author has claimed. I take as a key example Naomi Wolf learning after her book was "done" that a significant chunk of it was based on a misunderstanding of an admittedly confusing 19th century British legal phrase. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/naomi-wolfs-book-cor...
I think maybe the idea that a single author spending months or years on their research, which the publish as a single bound and polished work is misguided -- an academic trying to do similar work in multiple articles would have gotten review from peers on each article, and hopefully have not spent so much time working under a correctable misunderstanding.
Fact checking as a separate job is more for journalism than books. But editors have fact checking as part of their jobs. (It is not copy-editing, which is a different job.)
Many nonfiction authors will hire a fact checker separately. They don't want to look like they missed something. Errors still happen, of course.
I find that the kind of people who obsess the conspiracy of "alternative facts" are the same people who uncritically take everything presented by modern science as truth. Except when it comes to economics of course!
I spent years as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor. One of the reasons I don't so much any more is I was getting too many political books, books where the authors were not so interested in facts or logic--or even internal consistency. Most of these books were 'conservative' but this was not exclusively a right-wing issue. Ideology requires glossing over the complexity of the real world. It's draining to read this stuff, with limited ability to make corrections.
Hell, now I work for a uni press, and I'm seeing this in our own list more and more--writers are giving up on deep analysis.
Indeed, I became aware of various conspiracy theories and woo through books and newspapers in the 90s