Textbook Plagiarism Devastates 2% of Student Population
In the continuing theme of Fake Writer Day, this one's a stretch: certain passages in Daniel J. Boorstein's high school history textbook A History of the United States are identical to those in another textbook, America: Pathways to the Present, which was written by multiple authors. The catch is, the big names on the books' spines aren't necessarily responsible for everything in the text, as textbooks, with their constantly changing editions, are mostly written by a slew of uncredited writers. So while Boorstein and the big names from Pathways likely did not plagiarize, there are writers beneath them who may very well have lifted passages or "internalized" words from other texts. If a hip teen packaging company were involved, it might not be that unlike the case of Kaavya Viswanathan. And if those 1000-page textbooks were used for anything more than a doorstop, this all might matter.
