Readers deserve better from popular science books

Non-fiction publishing is failing its readers. It is pumping out books with supposedly game-changing ideas, without bothering to ensure basic accuracy. These tomes have the appearance of academic work, but none of the rigour.

My frustration about this has been building for years and finally exploded when I reviewed Yuval Noah Harari’s new book Nexus, which is full of ill-supported nonsense, including a hopelessly incoherent definition of the concept of information.

Consider Johann Hari: formerly a journalist at The Independent, he was caught plagiarising and resigned. He has since produced a string of unreliable books about medical controversies. Lost Connections…