More on the Plagiarism Issue: The Buck Blinds All

More so called plagiarized passages have been discovered in the Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, novel, taken from yet a second author's work. Everybody seems to be wringing hands over this, but little is being made of the real culprit: the publisher.

Miss Viswanathan is a young writer, doing what all young writers do, emulating the writing she admires. This is how writers generally start out being writers. The passages that have been brought to attention as examples of plagiarized work vacillate between copying and paraphrasing. In an acedemic context both require citing the original author's work.

Beginning writers do this sort of thing on their way to discovering their own voices. Good publishers recognize this and they don't publish such work. Porn publishers and other pulp publishers have never worried about this sort of activity any more than TV executives trying to immitate hit TV shows have.

So what we are seeing in the "chic-lit" genre is similar opportunism by publishers who recognize that their customers just want more of the same, kind of like being thrilled that there is a MacDonalds or Wal-Mart or Starbucks in every town.

We love being unique individuals just like everyone else.

The real culprit here is the publisher who is in a mad corporate rush to make sure next quarter's bottom line is at least slightly better than last quarter's. No one in this particular instance is interested in anything other than a fast buck.