A publisher can fact-check a 4,000-word article. Not a 100,000-word book.

In the light of recent events, some people have been asking why publishers don't fact-check books. It's a reasonable question. Earlier this week, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pulled the book Imagine from the shelves after learning that the author had fabricated some of the quotations. 

I want to point something out. The three features I've written for Wired are roughly 4,000 words long. And it took something like two weeks for Wired to fact-check each of them.