UK publication pulls article calling ‘Oxford Companion’ critics “sad people”
Beer writer, Stephen Beaumont, brought to light a post by British Beer Writer/Author, Roger Protz, last week. The article has been pulled by The Morning Advertiser though still lives on in Google’s cache.
In spite of this, the bloggerati have come piling in, damning the book and some saying it should be withdrawn. How they must wish they had been around in the 1930s when book-burning was in vogue.
(Martyn) Cornell expresses his thanks to a Canadian blogger, Alan McLeod, who has “started a repository for errors” in the Oxford Companion. What sad people. It’s an established fact in publishing that most encyclopedias and dictionaries contain errors that are corrected for subsequent editions. I’m told the Oxford Companion to Wine had around 1,000 errors in the first edition.
via A Brief Note on The Oxford Companion to Beer | Blogging at World of Beer.
Possible entry for the Protz Shield.
Also Protz was a paid contributor to the book, which he fails to mention in the “review”.
Dave, it is my understanding that no contributor to the Oxford publication was a paid contributor. I could be wrong but my understanding is that Oxford will only expense for shipping costs or material resource costs, things of that nature.
From reading, “A final thing here – I have read posts by some writers, who were among the very few who rejected assignments, who have said that they were annoyed at the tiny remuneration offered to them by OUP.” [and a few more sentences after that, but don’t want to bog it all down with a massive paste] http://ocbeercommentary.wikispaces.com/Garrett+Oliver+on+The+Oxford+Companion+to+Beer and some general comments at I believe Stan’s, Martyn’s and Ron’s, I was led to believe contributors (possibly not all, but some) were paid. Not tons of money, but still paid.
Actually… re-reading the cached post, he doesn’t even mention that he wrote some of the entries.
Like I said, my understanding is they are only paid for services that were above their own research time and writing, ie if they needed to ship something or had to purchase an item to complete their research.
Some contributors are said to have been paid 5 cents a word: http://appellationbeer.com/blog/who-is-the-worlds-most-influential-beer-writer/
Ron says Protz was a paid contributor to the book (comments on worldofbeer post). Considering Protz doesn’t even mention contributing to the OCB in his review (it just rubs me the wrong way to hide information like that when writing a review), I’m going to go with Ron’s info.