Carter's ink

The New York Sun reports that shareholders of CBS are riled up at former president Jimmy Carter, and publisher Simon & Schuster, over controversial statements in Carter's book about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." There are expected to be complaints at today's shareholder's meeting. Simon is a subsidiary of CBS.

The shareholders are angry at some of the statements in the book -- Harvard Law professor led the charge against the book when it was published last fall -- and want the publisher to take steps to prevent errors in future Simon & Schuster books.

This idea has come up before -- why can't book publishers have fact-checking staff, as some magazines have? Newspapers don't usually have such staff, but their editors and reporters are charged with certifying the accuracy of stories. The problem is that authors are not employees of book publishers, but independent parties who sign contracts for particular books. Simon & Schuster doesn't own Jimmy Carter's book; its contract is a license to publish it. Carter is the rightsholder.

Standard publishing contracts contain language in which the author certifies that nothing in the manuscript is libelous or in any other way injurious to anyone's legal rights. If a book is found to be libelous or plagiarized, the publisher can and usually will pull the book. But not because some people don't like it.

Large publishers publish vast numbers of books, with thousands of facts. The Simon & Schuster fall list has more than 40 new books, and there are usually four seasonal lists per year. No big house is going to try to insure ahead of time that every book is inoffensive and error-free.