They can lie, but that lie will remain in the books that have gone into circulation. A lie on the internet can be reversed or erased after it has been consumed by millions of human eye balls.

This was dead, I vouched for it, I think it's a good point. Form does not determine the truthfulness of content.

From what I've heard through self-publishing media, nowadays, traditional publishing isn't even particularly disposed towards pushing back on things like these. They might even be all for publishing works based on outright lies if there's an existing customer base with open wallets.

Supposedly traditional publishing has become more and more conservative (not necessarily politically) with the risks they take on things they publish, so they'd be less likely to push back against widely-held ideas that are outright wrong. They'll really only publish authors with an established following or works that have a large base of interested consumers.

Edit: I just wanted to add that since I've heard these things so much, going to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble feels super weird. The books look nice, but they're all expensive and I have no sense that the selection has been curated for genuine quality or informational content. It's just what happens to being published now.

I greatly prefer the experience of going to thrift stores like Goodwill where the selection is chaotic, there's no real expectation of curation aside from maybe broad categories, and the books are gloriously cheap. You can find great stuff there!

The author clearly means professional publishers, who have editors and fact-checkers. Self-published books already lack trust. The reply also misses several other points the author makes, which I find ironic because it kind of goes into the direction the author bemoans: The author wrote a longer article to lay out his thoughts and it sure took him time to write and any reader time to read and digest and here is a quick oneliner as a rebuttal that took no time and effort and is superficial.

Some of the biggest lies in history where, indeed, made with books. Examples go from "Malleus Maleficarum" to "Mein Kampf" to even "Chariots of the Gods".

But there is a difference in efficacy. It is harder to lie in books than it is in social media. Books are like trees, they grow slowly, they're a discourse that spans months or years. On this timeframe it is easier to debunk lies. Social media is different. A lie can pop and spread there in one or 2 days. Once someone debunks it there are already 200 more replacing it. They are like bacterial infestations or japanese knotweed, much harder to combat and control.

Indeed, I became aware of various conspiracy theories and woo through books and newspapers in the 90s

I spent years as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor. One of the reasons I don't so much any more is I was getting too many political books, books where the authors were not so interested in facts or logic--or even internal consistency. Most of these books were 'conservative' but this was not exclusively a right-wing issue. Ideology requires glossing over the complexity of the real world. It's draining to read this stuff, with limited ability to make corrections.

Hell, now I work for a uni press, and I'm seeing this in our own list more and more--writers are giving up on deep analysis.

I find that the kind of people who obsess the conspiracy of "alternative facts" are the same people who uncritically take everything presented by modern science as truth. Except when it comes to economics of course!