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Chris Anderson and his US publisher Hyperion have said they intend to "correct" future editions of his title Free after the Virginia Quarterly Review said it had "discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources", with most "but not all" coming from Wikipedia.
VQR said the instances were identified after a cursory investigation of several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. In some cases, errors found on Wikipedia were "reproduced verbatim in Free".
Responding in an email after VQR posted its findings online, Anderson said he "had the original sources footnoted," but "lost the footnotes at the 11th hour", and admitted that in his "rush" to publication he had forgotten to do a "write-through [which] covered all the text that was not directly sourced". He added: "All those are my screw-ups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources".
His publisher Hyperion stated: "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book."
Hyperion says that it intended to have the notes online by the time that the book was published.