Ethics and Publishing

ast week Henry Holt & Company stopped printing and selling “The Last Train From Hiroshima,”

because its author had relied on a fraudulent source for a portion of the book and possibly fabricated others.

digital media raises the question of what part the traditional book publisher will play in the future

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

he new information technology doesn’t just create generation-3.0 special interests; it arms them with precision-guided munitions. The division of readers and viewers into demographically and ideologically discrete micro-audiences makes it easy for interest groups to get scare stories (e.g. “death panels”) to the people most likely to be terrified by them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America.