How Professional Book Publishing Fact-Checking Remains an Illusion

When we buy a professionally published book we tend to believe that it has been more seriously fact-checked than a self-published book. But that is not quite the case as explained in this interesting paper ‘Gay Talese Isn’t Alone: Why Aren’t More Books Factchecked?‘.

This must-read article narrates the story of an author seeking a thorough fact-checking of this book, after a few very public fiascos of the publishing industry. And he finds it very hard to do in a comprehensive manner.

This is quite the same issue of accuracy of Wikipedia against traditional encyclopedia. Traditional encyclopedia are only checked by a limited number of people, which can introduce bias and limits the means available for thorough fact-checking. Wikipedia is as accurate, in a different way: less bias but also more smaller mistakes.

The conclusion of the experiment was clear: “Yet even with all these eyes, not just diligently looking and parsing the words of the book, but some specifically hired to find errors, we missed something.” Not something big, but inaccuracies are always likely to enter a book volume.

So don’t always believe that professionally published books are 100% accurate!