Sorry, I meant there's *no work going on here* in that sentence.
On 12/20/10, Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrov...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. >