Melville House Books

Chris Anderson

Wired editor Chris Andersen was the talk of the book biz yesterday, due to the too-ironic-to-believe revelation that his forthcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (one of those only-in-big-publishing projects: a $26.99 hardcover that talks about things such as information wanting to be free) was riddled with text Andersen apparently lifted from other texts … for free.

It started with a heads up in the Virginia Quarterly Review by Waldo Jaquith, who said he’d been sent a review copy of the book, which pubs on July 7, and “discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources…. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.” It’s a thorough job, even including thumbnails comparing texts side-by-side.

Shortly afterwards, however, came an even more devastating update from blogger Ed Champion, who said “the VQR’s investigations only begin to scratch the surface. A cursory plunge into the book’s contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.” Champion, too, does a thorough job of giving examples, and concludes that “It appears that Chris Anderson, who boasts in the acknowledgments about spending a year and a half writing this book, has spent most of these eighteen months repurposing content from other sources.”

A report on Gawker by Ryan Tate offers “the upshot: Print authors like Mike Pollan were cited for ‘intellectual debts’ Anderson owed them, while many of the forward-thinking, freely-contributing writers Anderson champions in the book got no attribution. As it happens, this is violates the copyright license governing Wikipedia.”

In a statement to Gawker later circulated to other newsletters and bloggers, Anderson said “this is my screwup… I feel terrible about it.”  But he also diminished the appropriations as “mistakes” not plagiarism, and said “We’ll have the original notes that were supposed to accompany the book, which includes all these, online by publication date.” His publisher, meanwhile — Hyperion — took his side, and his spin, telling Gawker, “We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.