When I was a news researcher, it was surprising to me that you were allowed to cite a fact previously reported in our own pages to resolve a query. But at least the effort to get things right was serious; if this Atlantic piece is correct, book publishers don’t bother now, and never really did.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/why-books-still-arent-fact-checked/378789/
“When I was working on my book, I did an anecdotal survey asking people: Between books, magazines, and newspapers, which do you think has the most fact-checking?” explained Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error, a book on media accuracy, and founder of a blog by the same name. Almost inevitably, the people Silverman spoke with guessed books.
“A lot of readers have the perception that when something arrives as a book, it’s gone through a more rigorous fact-checking process than a magazine or a newspaper or a website, and that’s simply not that case,” Silverman said. He attributes this in part to the physical nature of a book: Its ink and weight imbue it with a sense of significance unlike that of other mediums.Fact-checking dates back to the founding of Time in 1923, and has a strong
tradition at places like Mother Jones and The New Yorker. (The Atlantic checks every article in print.) But it’s becoming less and less common even in the magazine world. Silverman suggests this is in part due to the Internet and the drive for quick content production. “Fact-checkers don’t increase content production,” he said. “Arguably, they slow it.”
What many readers don’t realize is that fact-checking has never been standard practice in the book-publishing world at all.
A Few Reasonable Words 