"If the publisher get sued because of your content, it is your fault." Absolutely - that exists in every book contract and always will. You are being hired as

"If the publisher get sued because of your content, it is your fault." Absolutely - that exists in every book contract and always will. You are being hired as the "domain expert", not the editors. You are putting yourself on the line and saying, "This is a 100% original work." You can't expect a $10/hr copy editor to know whether what you've written is copyrighted somewhere else, thus the clause. Many (if not all) of the larger book publishers will have a standard contract for first time authors. You might be able to change a few things here and there but, by and large, if you don't like it, then that's that. I've done a few book deals years back and I just have to say - it makes no sense, for me or to me, why one would not self-publish. I can think of only two reasons to not self-publish: (1) ego, and (2) time. Some people have this need to have their peers recognize "Hey, he wrote a book for O'Riley. I wish I could be like him." That's 100% ego. The "time" reason is that some people don't have the time to do all of the smaller work - submitting to Amazon, learning the formats, testing it on various devices, etc. "But Scott, you can't speak at so and so conference unless you are a big publisher guy." Ego "But Scott, you can raise your consulting rates." You can do the same with a self-published work "But Scott, you only need to sell 5% of the books to make the same amount of money if you self-publish." I know.