The ripples are now gone from the recent news that another fake memoir had passed through the editing process of a major U.S. publisher and into print.

We've become blase about the issue. Perhaps it was the excessive coverage granted James Frey and his trumped-up autobiography, "A Million Little Pieces," that prepared us for the too-familiar story of Margaret Seltzer, a woman in her 30s who pretended to be the survivor of gang life in South Central Los Angeles and wrote a book about it.

Every word of "Love and Consequences," including the "the's" and the "and's," (thank you, Mary McCarthy) was a lie. Yet, for three years, her editor at Riverhead Books, Sarah McGrath, apparently never challenged Seltzer's work. It took the author's sister to blow the whistle on her fraud, and the book was pulled from sale.

Publishers are not in the business of verifying every fact. They concentrate mainly on checking for plagiarism and libel.

It's not part of their tradition to challenge the contents of their authors' work, but to judge whether the book will succeed in a very competitive market.

"The most important thing for an editor, in my opinion, is keep the job separate from the policing functions of publishing," said Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction and poetry at the New Yorker magazine and Random House for more than 35 years.

"The fact is that the job of the editor is to be the staunch ally of any book her or she is working on. They're almost a cheerleader for the book, a comrade in arms of the author."

In publishing, editors not only acquire the book, but guide it through the various steps, from marketing, publicity and even the cover design, to publication, he explained. There isn't enough time for the nuts and bolts of verifying facts and, in the case of a memoir, doing a background check on the author.

Publishing houses have also cut staffs about 10 percent recently, Menaker said. "This is a business with a very narrow profit margin, so there have been cutbacks. Now, the industry does seem to be asking for more and more work from fewer and fewer people. There's going to be sloppy mistakes."

Menaker left the publishing business last year to launch an author-interview program on the Internet, "Titlepage.TV."

Following the dust-ups with Frey and Seltzer, he does concede that "publishers need to take a few more steps at the time of acquisition" to vet the authors, especially writers of memoirs. He suggests that the companies' legal departments extend their duties to verifying backgrounds. Menaker also asks readers to "bring a skeptical attitude to what they read. Approach a document with your own skepticism. Words on paper are not necessarily always true," he reminds.

More and more, publishers expect the author to vouch for the accuracy and conclusions they express. They don't normally bring in experts to check facts or judge whether the book accurately reflects the age in which it is set.

"Let's face it," said Menaker, "because of cutbacks, authors are expected to do more, even their own publicity."

And for those reasons, a lot of books are rife with small errors and false representations.

Take the forthcoming Riverhead title, "American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White" with the additional subtitles -- probably because nobody today knows those names -- "The Birth of the 'It' Girl and the Crime of the Century."

Nesbit was a teen model and vamp from Tarentum who became the mistress of architect Stanford White in the early 1900s. Later, she married Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw, who shot White to death for deflowering Evelyn and was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

It's written by Paula Uruburu, an English professor at Hofstra University. Its editor is Sarah McGrath, "whose instincts are right on," says Uruburu in her acknowledgments.

That was her first mistake.

Uruburu proceeds to botch the basic details of Nesbit's childhood in Western Pennsylvania, the age of her father when he died, the nature of Tarentum and the history and geography of Pittsburgh in the early 1890s when the North Side was a separate city, Allegheny.

For many authors, Western Pennsylvania is a blank on the map. In his recent book, "Taking on The Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida M. Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller," journalist Steve Weinberg:

Calls Titusville the county seat of Crawford County (it's Meadville), brands Tarentum, which he spells Tartentum, a suburb of Pittsburgh in the 1850s and sets the battle of Homestead on July 5 and the death toll of that major labor clash at more than 20.

In fact, the battle was July 6 and the dead numbered 10.

Weinberg also believes that the wealthy yet modest Pittsburgh banker Thomas Mellon "eventually joined [John D.] Rockefeller among the wealthiest, most influential men in the nation," when we know that Mellon was neither as wealthy nor influential as the richest man in America.

Son Andrew, as secretary of the U.S. Treasury, had the influence.

Weinberg has acknowledged his errors graciously, has taken full responsibility for them and has vowed that if there's a second printing or the book is republished as a paperback, he will make corrections.

Although his mistakes have little bearing on his history of Tarbell, the Pennsylvania-born journalist whose investigation of Rockefeller's Standard Oil company contributed to the breakup of that trust, they are beyond repair unless the book is reprinted.

Uruburu, on the other hand, has the opportunity to fix the errors before publication in May. I discovered them in an advance uncorrected proof.

She wrote in an e-mail:

"In the process of going over the non-corrected proof copy of my book it has been quite a task trying to reconstruct my notes (including information from a variety of historical societies and libraries in New York and PA) and sift through the fact versus the fiction which Evelyn's own mythologizing has made more difficult than I think is usual."

She has her work cut out for her.

The other difficulty with "American Eve" is its point of view -- Evelyn's -- as Uruburu admits, is constructed from the actress's two memoirs. Obviously, there's nobody alive to correct the one-time dancing girl, but it would be no surprise if she made up those memoirs just like Seltzer.

Publishers insist that reviewers check finished books with those galleys to make sure the slip-ups have been dealt with. In 2001, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a review for the Washington Post of "Noonday Demon," a book about depression, using the galley and complained in her review about the lack of a reference in the book.

Oates was caught. The reference was added to the finished book which Oates failed to check. When the Post had to run a correction, she whined: "There was no way this reviewer could have had access to the hardcover book at the time I'd written the review."

So why not wait until the finished book was available?

While reading a galley of David Maraniss' book on Roberto Clemente, I came across a variety of casual mistakes and pointed them out in a column.

The author complained -- not directly to me -- about jumping the gun before he had time to make corrections. When the book was published, some of those errors were still there.

The truth is that in order for a nonfiction book to be accurate, the author must be willing to recheck every fact. The publisher isn't.

So, in the future, I think it's fair to blame the writer -- for errors of fact.

As for the Margaret Seltzers of the business, the responsibility is on the company that publishes the lies.