"I have been asked to present a short lesson on plagiarism to ninth graders."
Perhaps of indirectly related interest, I can offer a recent case for
discussion.
In a nutshell, a 19-year-old (he may be a community college student, but
that I do not know for a fact) submitted a book on cancer prevention to a
crypto-vanity publisher, which published the book a few months ago. (That
particular publisher does not charge fees up front and accepts pretty much
anything, so the barrier is very low.) The young man repeatedly and
unsuccessfully solicited his fellow vanity-press authors to buy his book in
order to achieve enormous sales, promising that in turn he would by copies
of their books (a hollow promise). His antics drew the attention of a
group of writers, who (to cut to the chase) examined a copy of the book and
quickly discovered that it was a pastiche of copy-and-paste snippets from
Web sources. The publisher (I use the term loosely) quickly and without
public comment withdrew the book (it is a print-on-demand--POD--book, so
there are no copies in stock anywhere), and may now face inquiries from the
various individuals and organizations from whom the plagiarist stole the
content of his little book.
The publisher apparently took at face value (despite the straining of
credulity necessary to do so) the purported author's claims that the
content of the book was original. As a result, the publisher AND the
so-called author could both be in legal trouble. (That remains to be
seen. As the book probably did not sell more than a dozen or two copies,
the issue may not be worth pursuing.) The authors who exposed the scam
wonder how much of the same style of copy-and-paste went into the young
man's school papers. My own guess is MUCH, and that an early exposure of
and discipline for his methods might have headed off the embarrassment that
now encompasses the so-called publisher (which, frankly, deserves all the
embarrassment it has invited, but that is another story).
For whatever it is worth.
Ken
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Ken Umbach
Umbach Consulting: a writing and research service
6966 Sunrise Blvd., #263, Citrus Heights, CA 95610 (mailing address)
916-733-2159 (this is voice mail, NOT a fax number)
www.umbachconsulting.com
ken@umbachconsulting.com
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