Accuracy of osprey books

[Andrew Brozyna]

Once in a while Osprey and other publishers are criticized for having poor editors that don't check for a book's accuracy. I should point out that none of my publishers have someone on staff to review the content of their books. I work with university presses and trade publishers. Fact checking may have been something done in the past, but these days production editors check the grammar and that's about it. In an ideal situation the acquisition editor knows a little something on the subject, but they won't be able to comment on a subject as specialized as Roman military equipment of the 1st century BC.

So, as Sean said, publishers are pretty much reliant on the quality of their individual authors. As a reader you can check out the reputation of the authors. Read multiple books on the same subject and you'll start to see what the general consensus is. In high school history was presented as a list of known "facts". It's been really interesting for me to see how much debate there actually is in the academic world!