Cleanse libraries of books containing errors of fact!
August 2, 2007 intellectual freedom No CommentsThe August 1 Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “Cambridge University Press announced this week that it would pulp all unsold copies of the 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, in response to a libel claim filed in England by Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker. The book suggests that businesses and charities associated with Mr. Mahfouz financed terrorism in Sudan and elsewhere during the 1990s.” CUP also “also promised to contact university libraries worldwide and ask them to remove the book from their shelves.”
OCLC shows that approximately 325 libraries report owning a copy of the book. OCLC also includes records for electronic versions from Overdrive and NetLibrary. One wonders how successful CUP's recall effort will be and hopes it will be an abysmal failure. This incident hasn't generated so much interest that copies are being offered for sale on eBay. The business decision is not as interesting as its implications for library collections. The gist of the issue is Mahfouz's complaint that the book makes false statements about him. Assume for the sake of argument that this is indeed true. It then follows that any book which contains erroneous statements should be recalled by its publisher and all copies destroyed. Talk about a slippery slope! This would mean the end of presidential candidate autobiographies, to say nothing of a good many books on innumerable topics including dinosaurs and contemporary global climate change. (This gets really tricky since there are certainly two mutually exclusive bodies of fact about global warming.)
In the absence of threatening lawsuits, who would judge which books should be removed from libraries? That question alone proves the folly of CUP's decision. Let us hope it does not become a guiding principle for editorial decisions.
