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Claims that a Lonely Planet contributor plagiarised and made up large sections of three guidebooks, widely reported in the mainstream media in recent days, have been ‘taken out of context,' according to the author at the centre of the controversy.

‘I did not make up sections. I did not plagiarise,' said Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book about his travel-writing experiences, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? (Pier 9, May).

However, Lonely Planet is now checking the accuracy of its guidebooks after the 32-year-old, who has worked on more than a dozen books, said that in one case he had not even visited the country that he wrote about. ‘They didn't pay me enough to go Colombia,' writes Kohnstamm in his book. ‘I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating--an intern in the Colombian Consulate. They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.'

Lonely Planet publisher Piers Pickard has since pointed out that Kohnstamm was never meant to go to Colombia because he was only contracted to write the guidebook's history section. ‘Two other authors were paid on that book to go to Colombia and they did. They did the normal job we expect of our authors, which is to visit every hotel, every restaurant, every site,' Pickard said.

‘In all three books, the content he writes is very much in a minority (but) because he has made allegations about the integrity of that content, we're doing a full review.'
‘We've sent out authors to those countries, they are checking everything Thomas has written, and based on their findings, we will do whatever it takes to correct any inaccuracies in those books,' Pickard said.

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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