Originally Posted by
Wayfaring
Joy,
While there are certainly drawbacks to the publishing world and process, there is more quality control and source checking in that world than there is in say for example, an online forum such as this, or even Wikipedia.
For books that are published by someone other than themselves such as a publishing company, which is the context of what I was talking about, this is certainly true.
Or is your point that when you see a source that has an ISBN, we should ignore that and instead go with the opinions of random posters in online interest group forums because they say they have facts and evidence?
Commercial presses tend to hire someone with credentials in the field that the book is being written in and pay a standard small fee for content editing. They do this to verify the quality of their content as it represents an investment.
Academic textbooks on the other hand many times represent some of the worst in the publishing industry. There is a lot more politics, price gouging, and similar on that side of it.
Please clarify what exactly you're getting at here.