As you can tell by the title, my impatience with publishers is rising. Their loose association with integrity becomes more evident every day. Last week, it was discovered that Lonely Planet, a travel guide publisher, was putting out books by an author who a) plagiarized and b) didn’t even travel to the places he wrote about and c) took money and freebies from businesses included in the guides.
Lonely Planet apparently has no intention of pulling the guides off the market because it “stands by the accuracy of its travel guides” and has “thus far found no inaccuracies.” Well, how about the copying? Or the fact that the entire Columbia section isn’t based on his own travel experience but what some intern he was banging told him in during coitus? The author says his initial admissions of wrongdoing were taken out of context and not true.
I’ve traveled a bit in my time and I never go anywhere without a travel book, but sometimes I end up buying more than one because each travel book has its own strengths, and, of course, its own weaknesses. Lonely Planet, one of the better guidebooks on the market, is using digital technology to address those issues by allowing customers to
Loading ...
Open Threads at Dear Author. Want to know what new releases are out this month and what readers are excited about reading? Check out the threads below. 
We don’t like to censor comments nor do we endorse the comments of any poster. We do reserve the right to moderate comments but most of the time will not, believing, as Justice Brandeis did, that the greater good is in “more speech, not enforced silence.”
