Thursday, 19 March 2015

Some provocative ideas here to untangle. How would Penguin — or anyone — check someone else’s claim to have cancer? You can’t ring their doctor and ask — patient confidentiality would forbid those who could verify or refute the claim from telling a third party. No one else can confirm for sure.

Publishing contracts with authors generally have a clause that says something like ‘all material purporting to be factual is true’ — so publishers put the onus on authors to be accurate. The alternative is to increase the price of books substantially to fact check them — and that is simply not done in this country. Experts may be asked to review an academic book or a general history or biography before it is published, but they do not check the facts (their expertise enables them to make a generalisation about whether or not the author’s work seems is by fact).

If an author lies to a publisher, they are most likely in breach of their contract — which means the publisher can cancel publication. Contract law seems a fairly dry and remote way to control a situation of misrespresented or false information — but that’s the safeguard the industry uses.

Book contracts will also generally ask authors to guarantee that any instructions are safe for others to follow — so a cookbook with a recipe that could harm someone’s health would also be in breach of contract. Again, this is not as sexy as demanding that ‘someone’ should have checked — but authors also have a responsibility to ensure that what they write is accurate.