Hoax-catching and QC in general: Why Oprah should tell the book biz to do e-books weeks before paper editions

Oprah got fooled again recently—by a Holocaust survivor who lied about his experiences, a tragedy first of all because it played into the hands of bigots. But along the way, publishing suffered yet another black eye.

“This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking,” the New York Times’ Motoko Rich and Joseph Berger correctly commented. The good news for Penguin‘s Berkley Books is that it canceled the tainted memoirs before the actual book reached the public. But that’s not always the case, and here’s how Oprah, now the major force in publishing, as well as an E booster, could help.

How Oprah could use her clout for E First

Oprah could lobby for E First, not just in the Kindle format but also in ePub and other major formats, and lean on publishers to publish e-book editions long before P, even if certain major reviewing publications might look askance. She could tell the publishers that if they wanted publicity on her bestseller-creating show,  E First would improve their chances since the books would have been mass-vetted, not just professionally checked.

An e-book is much easier to change, and if need be withdraw, than a paper book would be. What’s more, with entire books available to the readers in E, hoaxes can be spotted more easily. In the computer book field, and at Baen, readers can use E to get advanced looks at books on the way. It’s high time that this become a practice in the industry at large. Maybe there could even be subscription plans allowing this, a strategy that O’Reilly Media is already using.

Although hoax-catching is one justification for E First, in a besieged business without the resources for detailed fact-checking, others exist. How about the elimination of simple typos and other little glitches? I can’t tell you how grateful I am to an early reader of the e-version of The Solomon Scandals who spotted a few minor errors that even a crack pair of copy editors couldn’t catch. Within the e-edition, he also alerted us about paragraphing problems that an ePubWriter approach might have prevented, due to the ability to compose natively in ePub. But that was icing on the cake.

I just wish that we’d had more of a delay between the early e-versions and the paper version (the reasOn why the p-book has good but not perfect QC). I love the idea of testing a book on readers before it’s locked up in print. If anything, I believe this shows more respect, not less, for the medium of p-books and for traditional editorial standards. Not just from a hoax-prevention perspective, then, but also from a routine quality control one, Oprah could do book business a real service by championing E First.