Quality is too expensive for today's publishing game

Check that spelling, please!

An old acquaintance I caught up with by social media circa 2012 filled me in on how his lifetime love of chess had expanded into new arenas, including his writing reviews of books about the game.

He said one of his reviews of a title through the self-publishing firm iUnivese was scathing, and justifiably so: the book on Bobby Fischer was so horribly written, it had the chess grandmaster’s name spelled two different ways throughout!

“I will never review another book published through iUniverse,” he said. “So what have you been up to?”

The truthful answer would have been: I have self-published two sci-fi books -- through iUniverse. I had been eager to tell him of these works, but tipped off by his story, my response suddenly came out: “Oh, you know, the usual -- mowing the lawn, paying bills.”

Be assured, my sci-fi works, titled “Out From It All” and “Worlds,” had all names spelled consistently, and met higher literary quality standards as well. But the fact that the same company could let such rubbish as that Fischer fiasco roll off its presses was pretty disconcerting.

And it was more than an indictment of the booming self-publishing business.

I soon began to hear reports that the conventional book publishing industry’s standards as well were eroding.

The premier and the, uh, senator?

The much heralded “Astronaut Wives Club,” which has enlightening detail about the stresses and despairs endured by the women married to NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts, also refers to the kitchen debate between “Senator Richard Nixon” and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. That’s six years after Nixon went from senator to vice-president.

Throughout the audio version of Lilly Koppel’s book, the last name of Betty and Gus Grissom is pronounced “Grisham.”

If NASA had standards that sloppy, the Eagle would have landed in downtown Cleveland.

In the genre of baby boomer TV memories, we might not expect quite as much scholarly devotion as in books about great events like the moon landings. But my jaw still dropped when I saw posted reviews of actor Frank Bank’s memoirs of his years as Lumpy Rutherford on “Leave It To Beaver.”

They said Bank’s “They Call Me Lumpy” included gross factual errors about plots of episodes involving him -- plots any Beaver fan would know well. Then there were accusations by reviewers that Bank’s writing was frequently ungrammatical, to the extent that large parts of his book amount to nothing more than notes thrown together.

What happened to copy-editing, proofreading and fact-checking? Those get in the way of the modern goal of rapidly getting books out and reaping quick receipts from the ability of the enticing promotional paragraphs to prompt purchases by clicks.

And since e-publishing is the way these days for books and news reporting, errors can always be corrected later when enough of the readers post their complaints.

Which is another tribute to contemporary capitalism’s deftness at replacing qualified professionals with free “crowd sourced” labor.

We are in a time of regaining our awareness of ideals that were diminished in the era of “shock jock” raunchiness. Empathy and nuance are two of them. Let us add “professionalism” to the list.

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                                           Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA