Chris Anderson, who many of you techies may know, is the editor of Wired magazine and has published the renown book about internet business models called “The Long Tail.”

Waldo Jaquith was reading a promotional copy of Chris’ new book, Free, in which he found many instances of copied text from, you guessed it, the free *cough*online encyclopedia, wikipedia and several other sources. Waldo emailed Chris and his publisher alerting them to this fact.  Chris responded:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups…

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.

Nice find Waldo.  Very well done.  This is a bit unnerving coming from such a hot shot internet journalist.

P.S. If anyone wants to make funny edits, you can find the original Free cover here.

[via VQR] [spicybear/flickr pic]