The vast majority of Scholastic’s proofreaders are paid interns with little qualifications to correct factual errors in the books they review, such as the one containing a map omitting Israel, a former production intern at Scholastic said on Thursday.
Hours after an article first published in The Times of Israel Wednesday, the world’s largest children’s book publisher expressed “regret” on its blog for erasing Israel from a map in the book Thea Stilton and the Blue Scarab Hunt, published in 2012. Scholastic promised to stop shipment of the book, revise the map, and reprint it, but provided no explanation on how the error came about or what it would do to prevent similar ones from taking place.