Has Anyone Else Been Following This Story?

As a relatively rabid travel reader (and Travel Channel junkie), I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of a dozen Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean, admitted that he had plagiarized his work, and never even visited one of the locations he wrote about.

I've always wondered how travel writers, or even a small team of them, could cover so much ground, pay for semi-decent meals and hotel stays, and still make a profit on the book's release. Now it seems inevitable, especially in light of the seemingly daily admissions of made-up "facts" and misremembered "memories" by published authors, that it was all made up.

I'm trying not to take this personally (I mean, obviously it's not), but in a world where truth seems as malleable as one of those bendy straws, I started to wonder:

Is travel so unneeded as to warrant no system of checks and balances to fact-check writers' work? Has it passed into the "buyer beware" realm, along with various other luxury goods? And are books themselves such "product" that we've forgotten how they can move our insides, change our outsides, and give us enough perspective so that anything, really anything, is possible?

God, I hope not.

Here's a link to the original story, if you haven't read about it yet:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/14/usa.travelleisure?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront