On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:36 AM, spir <denis.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:33:39 -0800 > Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote: > >> The funny thing is that I wouldn't have expected anyone to be able to create >> book 96 pages long on D just out of Wikipedia articles. And $44 for 96 >> pages?! >> LOL. The knowledge in that book would have to be pure gold to worth that >> kind of >> price. What a total rip-off. It probably popped up just because TDPL was >> released >> and some guys were looking to cash in. Maybe they were even hoping that some >> people would be foolish enough to mistake their book for TDPL. >> >> I don't think that print-on-demand publishing is necessarily a bad thing, but >> this is obviously a case where someone is trying to cash in on something that >> they did no work for. > > I agree the price is surprisingly high. > But you are very wrong in stating "trying to cash in on something that they > did no work for": Making a book out of diverse material is _much_ work (I've > done it). Actually so much and difficult work that it's often worth rewriting > from scratch! Just like trying to put together a bunch of lib modules and > make an app run fine out of that ;-) >
I don't think they put much work in it. Probably just print the wikipedia-article and some related (==linked) articles, maybe recursively to fill at least these 96 pages. I'd be surprised if these books weren't 99% automatically generated (the last 1% is selecting a picture for the cover).