Here's the good news.

As an author, publisher, or book publicist -- or perhaps all three -- you're a charter member of the book publishing industry. You have a bit of power in your hands. You can use that power wisely or unwisely, and sometimes, good people do both. (The latter, we hope, they do inadvertently.)

We'd all like our balance sheet to be positive, at the end of the day. We'd like our good deeds to vastly outweigh our bad deeds.

The good news for all of us who sometimes fail is this: regardless of how we mess up, we will never, ever do anything more hurtful than to publish O.J. Simpson's confession to a double murder. Nor will we ever tape an interview in which we try to justify ourselves.

If this interview makes you ashamed to be a part of the publishing industry, take a deep breath. I share your feelings. I just celebrate the fact that choices of this sort are seldom made by people in our industry and that this is an anomaly. Hopefully, we'll never see anything like it again in our lifetimes.