Lonely Planet's author fraud

[vino]

THE Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.

Thomas Kohnstamm also claims in a book that he accepted free travel, in contravention of the Melbourne-based company's policy.

His revelations have rocked the travel publisher, which sells more than six million guides a year -- guides that generations of tourists have come to rely on.

Mr Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? said yesterday that he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Columbia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.

In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

"They didn't pay me enough to go Columbia," he said. "I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Columbian Consulate.

"They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do."

An email to management posted on the company's internal authors' forum describes Mr Kohnstamm's book as "a car crash waiting to happen".

-SNIP-

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23527770-2,00.html

Bit of a blow to Lonely Planets reputation I think.

[Deja Q]

1. If he dated fully grown poultry, or at least Mrs. Olson, would he have had a better take on Colombia

or would it have been just another cup of mountain-grown?