Publisher Random House recently announced it would refund buyers of James Frey’s bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces – you know, the book lauded by Oprah before Frey admitted to altering the facts. Those of you wanting your money back need only to send proof of purchase to the publisher: page 163 for hardcover refunds, the front cover for paperback refunds, or a piece of packaging for audio book refunds.
To the legions of readers who embraced this book with all the zeal of a preschooler and his Elmo doll, Random House’s refund deal is perhaps of little consolation over being duped. Had I bought the book, I wouldn’t mind tearing out page 163 and a few hundred other pages as well. But the deal begs a bigger question: To what lengths will major publishing houses go in defending their star sellers?
Needless to say, the court-ordered Random House settlement of $2.35 million – the first of its kind – is a mere pittance compared to the millions of little dollars it and Frey earned prior to the controversy (neither Frey nor the publisher has admitted any wrongdoing). Are these guys bulletproof? Just look at this year’s laundry list of publishing skirmishes and you can see that a little bad press isn’t exactly closing down business:
- Little, Brown pulled Kaavya Viswanathan’s popular debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, after the Harvard sophomore was accused of plagiarizing whole sections of the book (the publisher pulled it from shelves);
- Random House defended a separate lawsuit claiming Dan Brown had plagiarized the work of two historians in his bestselling behemoth The Da Vinci Code (the publisher won the case in April, though an appeal is pending);
- Publisher Crown fended off allegations that Ann Coulter plagiarized passages in her latest book, Godless (the publisher deemed the allegations “trivial and meritless as they are irresponsible”); and my favorite out-of-left-field submission,
- In The Expected One (published by Touchstone Fireside), author Kathleen McGowan claims to actually be a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Holy editorializing, Batman!
It just goes to show that in this day and age you can never be wholly sure what you’re getting into when you walk out of a bookstore or seal a purchase on Amazon. Book sales seem to have trumped the almighty truth, often in the name of “creative nonfiction,” and publishers are more willing than ever to go to court (and the court of opinion) over it.
If they were held to a higher standard, as newspapers are, then maybe we’d be getting somewhere.
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