From Jonathan Bailey:

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with being an aggregator. If done well, an aggregator can provide an invaluable service both to the source material and to their audience. However, Sichko did not make it clear that he was such an aggregator, denying both his audience the chance to find these new voices and those voices the recognition he could have given them.

Just substitute Hesse for Sichko. Strictly speaking, it appears that Hesse did not plagiarize; he merely copied stories without attribution and then tried to deny it. As I wrote at the time, it’s not about the wrongdoing, it’s about the corruption of the communication channel.

I like Bailey’s phrasing above. There’s nothing wrong with being an aggregator. There are lots of great nonfiction books which are basically collections of existing stories about a topic . . . ummm, here’s one I read the other day: The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage, by Nick de Semlyen. I guess he did some original research on this book, interviewing some of the protagonists directly. But most of the book is a retelling of stories that were already out there. And that’s fine! These are stories that I hadn’t heard before, and Semlyen told them well and juxtaposed them artfully. And he gave sources. Even if the book were 100% aggregation, that’s just fine. Much if not most of popular nonfiction—I’m using “popular” in a positive sense here, as in, it’s popular because people like it for a good reason—is aggregation.

To hide your sources, though, that’s not cool. Not cool for the earlier authors and not cool for the reader.

The good news is that, as Bailey says, it’s not hard to give sources. Nobody will mind. Readers can ignore the sources if they wish, or they can follow up if they want to learn more. Nobody will think less of you. It’s a win-win! As long as you understand the material you’re copying, you’ll be fine. With Christian Hesse this should be no problem, as I’m pretty sure he understands chess very well, much better than me!