WASHINGTON - The editor-in-chief of technology magazine Wired apologized on Wednesday for failing to cite online encyclopedia Wikipedia in passages in his new book, the ironically titled "Free."

"This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication," Chris Anderson said in a post on his blog at Wired.com.

Anderson was responding to the plagiarism charges after the literary journal the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) pointed out similarities between Wikipedia entries and passages in an advance copy of his new book, "Free: The Future of a Digital Price," which is to be published by Hyperion on July 7.

"VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free," said Anderson, an influential technology writer whose previous works include a book about the Internet called "The Long Tail."

He said he had intended to credit Wikipedia for a number of passages in footnotes but they were dropped in the drafting process for the book. "In most cases I did do a writethrough of the non-quoted Wikipedia text, although clearly I didn't go nearly far enough and too much of the original Wikipedia authors' language remained," he said.

"This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all," he said.

"That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I'd like to extend a special apology to them," he said.

Anderson also provided a statement from Hyperion in which the publisher said "we are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response."

"It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book," the Hyperion statement said. -AFP