Don't believe everything you read about in the New York Times Book Review -- take it from the New York Times Book Review. Watch it this weekend for "The Corrections," an essay reminding you that two hard covers and an impressive-looking dustjacket do not an error-free publication make. On the contrary, it's not that books are less reliable than newspapers; they're just harder to correct the next day in a little blurb a few pages in and below the fold. Ask Seth Mnookin, naturally; the author, Nora Krug, actually doesn't but of course leads with Mnookin's infamous corrections section to the paperback version of "Hard News."

Krug is quick to point out that Mnookin's initiative is novel not because his book was riddled with errors, but because most of the times the little errors peppering a book will go either unnoticed or uncorrected. For those of us who like to set some store by what we read in books, this article is a mite disturbing; Simon & Schuster executive VP and publisher David Rosenthal notes that publishers typically "rely on the warranties of the author" (and who'd ever imagine that an author racing to meet a deadline might not have time to stringently fact-check?). Also, fact-checking departments at publishing houses are not super common. Ergo, mistakes - some eensy (i.e. "The executive dining room of the Times is on the eleventh, not the fourteenth floor of the paper's headquarters"), some less-than-eensy (Douglas Brinkley's Kerry biography "Tour of Duty" which had all sorts of corrections for the revised edition). Even the New Yorker's crack fact-checking department (staffed by Ivy League grads as it is) can be misled: Krug quotes author Megan Marshall, who recalls the fact-checking process for an excerpt of her book, in which the fact-checkers "relied heavily on books she knew were flawed."

The upshot of this article is that mistakes are there, unmarked and unnoticed on the printed (and bound) page. So put down your book and go turn on the TV; I think Geraldo might be on.

Update: See? Here it is.

Update Redux: Oh, hilarious. The article about corrections going uncorrected has a correction! Now that's progress! (props to Regret the Error for that one)