On 12/20/10, Daniel Gibson <metalcae...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'd be surprised if these books weren't 99% automatically generated > (the last 1% is selecting a picture for the cover). >
This is exactly what they do (or maybe it's just a one man operation). Read this comment from wikipedia: "As an example of the "care" given to the books, the book "History of Georgia (country)" is about the European country Georgia but has a cover image of Atlanta in the American state Georgia.[nan 7] The Wikipedia article History of Georgia (country) does not make such a comical blunder. Another example is a book about an American football team with a soccer player on the cover.[nan 8]" "The articles are often poorly printed with features like missing characters from foreign languages, and numerous images of arrows where Wikipedia had links. It appears much better to read the original articles for free at the Wikipedia website than paying a lot of money for what has been described as a scam or hoax. Advertising for the books at Amazon and elsewhere does not reveal the free source of all the content. It is only revealed inside the books, which may satisfy the license requirements for republishing of Wikipedia articles" "An Amazon.com book search on June 9, 2009 gives 1009 (August 6 gives 1859, October 1 gives 3978, September 20, 2010 gives 64,890) "books" from Alphascript Publishing,[nan 3][nan 4] an imprint of VDM Publishing Group. 1003 of the books are described as "by John McBrewster, Frederic P. Miller, and Agnes F. Vandome". They are called editors in the book listings. A recent "author" is named as "Mainyu Eldon A." or similar. It seems the only content of the many books is free Wikipedia articles, with no sign that these three people have contributed to them. The books often have very long titles that are full of keywords. Presumably, this is to make them more likely to be found when searching on sites such as Amazon.com." "As of 20 September 2010, 64,881 similar books are also available from Betascript Publishing [nan 9][nan 10] "by Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, Susan F. Maseken",[nan 11] including a book about The Police Reunion Tour,[nan 12] featuring a picture of Police on its cover.[nan 13]" and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666149: "There's unfortunately already a whole boatload with extremely poor quality control, totally crapping up Google Books and Amazon results, especially for more niche topics. They're generally automatically compiled by a script for tens of thousands of titles, and then printed on demand, attempting to pass themselves off as original books on the subject (no mention of "Wikipedia" anywhere). Two of the more notorious publishers are Icon Group (some examples: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks:1&tbo=1&q=%22we...) and Alphascript (example: http://www.amazon.com/dp/6130070446). Sort of a meatspace version of content farming." So really there's work going on here, they just print out articles with no editing whatsoever, and print a pretty picture on the front page of the book. I wouldn't be surprised that those 3-4 editors that are always listed do not even exist.
