What is this D book?

[Andrej Mitrovic]

Sorry, I meant there's *no work going on here* in that sentence.

On 12/20/10, Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/20/10, Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes at 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.
>