I’d presume the professor would do a quick sanity search to see if by coincidence relevant works by such an author would exist before setting that trap. Upon searching I can find no such author of any sort of publication.
All people replying that there’s no problem because such author does not exist seem to have an strange idea that students don’t get nervous and that it’s perfectly ok to send them on wild-goose chases because they’ll discover the instruction was false.
I sure hope you are not professors. In fact, I do hope you do not hold any kind of power.
Strangely enough I recall various little mistakes in assignments or handing in assignments, and I lived.
Maybe this would be an undue stress/wild goose chase in the days where you’d be going to a library and hitting up a card catalog and doing all sorts of work. But now it’s “plug name into google, no results, time to email the teaching staff about the oddity, move on with my day and await an answer to this weird thing that is like a normal weird thing that happens all the time with assignments”.
On the scale of “assisstive technology users get the short end of the stick”, this is pretty low, well behind the state of, for example, typically poor closed captioning.
