Print-On-Demand Publisher VDM Infects Amazon

erich666 writes "In recent months a flood of so-called books have been appearing in Amazon's catalog. VDM Publishing's imprints Alphascript and Betascript Publishing have listed over 57,000 titles, adding at least 10,000 in the previous month alone. These books are simply collections of linked Wikipedia articles put into paperback form, at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as 'Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.' Such titles do have the marketing effect of turning up in many different searches. There is debate on Wikipedia about whether their 'VDM Publishing' page should contain the words 'fraud' or 'scam.' VDM Publishing's practice of reselling Wikipedia articles appears to be legal, but is ethically questionable. Amazon customers have begun to post 1-star reviews and complain. Amazon's response to date has been, 'As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.' The words 'and pay us' were left out. Amazon carries, as a Googled guess, 2 million different book titles, so VDM Publishing is currently 1/35th of their catalog, and rapidly growing."

Comments

Read the license?

[sopssa]

It's all about the license

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License

Creative Commons Deed
This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.

You are free:
- to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
- to Remix—to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:
- Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
- Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

With the understanding that:
- Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
-- your fair dealing or fair use rights;
-- the author's moral rights; and
-- rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
- Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As it is, they fit all of these. They attribute the original writers in their books. They are fully legit.

If you make content under Creative Commons or other licenses that allow paid redistribution, you also agree for someone else making money out of it in a suitable way. That is the real freedom and the basis of Creative Commons ShareAlike license - everyone is free to use it as they please, as long as the original author is attributed. If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.

Re:Read the license?

[petermgreen]

Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
Which is actually somewhat hard to do for wiki articles. You really need to go through the history pretty carefully to find not only the authors who contributed directly but also the authors whose work was copied and pasted around with only a vauge reference to the source in the edit history to put together a proper atribution for a wiki article.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more about the questionable nature of their publishing than their use of Wikipedia content.

Re:Read the license?

[sopssa]

Which is actually somewhat hard to do for wiki articles. You really need to go through the history pretty carefully to find not only the authors who contributed directly but also the authors whose work was copied and pasted around with only a vauge reference to the source in the edit history to put together a proper atribution for a wiki article.

But doesn't that make the original Wikipedia writers liable if they copied someone else work? I've seen many occasions when newspapers have copied each other and just attributed the original source for the info when it later turned out to be false. But as it was attributed, the liability kind of went to the original writer. In either case, it would also make Wikipedia in serious danger if any of their writers would be held liable if they were just copying or attributing other sources.

Re:Read the license?

[eldavojohn]

If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.

You're confused about where the complaint is originating from. Honestly I'd be flattered to buy my words from Amazon.com in a printed format. I've never been published nor produced anything worth publishing. Sure I might be annoyed money went to a shady company but "Look, ma, it's me!"

The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so. You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work. Sure, you'd have small publishing houses printing "work" on things like free energy or whatever might sell to a niche market. But you'd never have a publisher capable of VDM's feat because of the print-on-demand requirement.

So now we're in this transition period where a few folks know everything about Multigrid GPUs and notice a new book has come on sale and they must have it to complete their library. Well, it's pure unadulterated shit. But VDM Verlag gets that $60 on a couple sales for college libraries or well paid GPU engineers. And it takes a while for word to get out that VDM is what it is. VDM is capitalizing off of this transition period of consumer trust in books to consumer awareness about print-on-demand. VDM is making a boatload of money but I can't think of a good way to fix the system and, like you said, there's nothing technically illegal about their strategy.

Sadly instead of empowering books and their content, the advent of print-on-demand will cause people to doubt the once rigid standards books held. And rightfully so with entrepreneurs like VDM waltzing around. Don't think this won't spread or VDM won't set up fronts to publish under to avoid their known muckraked name.

Re:Read the license?

[Enleth]

Sure, you're right, they're a-OK from a legal point of view, but they still are a bunch of douchebags. If nothing else, because they flood the search indexes of Amazon and Google with useless crap that matches almost anything and makes it harder to find relevant publications. This benefits absolutely no one. Actually, I don't see how it could benefit even them and Amazon, as I can't imagine anyone buying this crap for any purpose, other than maybe some extravagant and expensive kind of toilet paper.

Additionally, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the spirit and purpose of Wikipedia, which is not as well-defined and, arguably, as important (well, from a legal point of view, it's not important at all) as the license, but it is there nontheless. People who create content and release it under permissive licenses still have their right to say that they don't appreciate some uses of their work, even though they allow it. Of course, any wise author will admit that it's just the price of making Free things, but even wise people need to rant and gripe sometimes.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use

"""Attribution: To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikimedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users. """

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

... I can't imagine anyone buying this crap for any purpose, other than maybe some extravagant and expensive kind of toilet paper.

I would buy toilet paper Wikipedia articles.

Re:Read the license?

[causality]

It's more about the questionable nature of their publishing than their use of Wikipedia content.

It made me smile to see someone appreciate a very simple matter without feeling a need to delve into copyright law or otherwise complicate it. I hope this is modded up.

VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free. They seem to be counting on Thomas Tusser's observation that "a fool and his money are soon parted." As far as I know, no one is accusing them of using force or fraud so anyone who does business with them is acting voluntarily. For that reason, I have no moral objection to what they are doing, though I believe it deserves to fail because it lacks merit.

Re:Read the license?

[John Hasler]

> You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the
> author(s) had done their homework.

Not in the nearly sixty years that I have been reading books.

Re:Read the license?

[causality]

The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so. You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work. Sure, you'd have small publishing houses printing "work" on things like free energy or whatever might sell to a niche market. But you'd never have a publisher capable of VDM's feat because of the print-on-demand requirement.

So now we're in this transition period where a few folks know everything about Multigrid GPUs and notice a new book has come on sale [amazon.com] and they must have it to complete their library. Well, it's pure unadulterated shit. But VDM Verlag gets that $60 on a couple sales for college libraries or well paid GPU engineers. And it takes a while for word to get out that VDM is what it is. VDM is capitalizing off of this transition period of consumer trust in books to consumer awareness about print-on-demand. VDM is making a boatload of money but I can't think of a good way to fix the system and, like you said, there's nothing technically illegal about their strategy.

This is really simple, at least to me. You guard against this by actually knowing a little about the company and/or product before you make the purchase. Legitimate companies that believe in the merits of their products will make this easy. If you cannot be bothered to do the few minutes of Googling this requires, or if you are the very first person to ever patronize this company and no one has ever written a review, then you accept that you're taking a risk. I don't view this as a system that needs fixing.

Incidentally, that risk should be easy enough to mitigate with a physical object like this (as opposed to something like boxed software). If you're going to buy it, buy it with a credit card. If you don't like it, return it. If they want to hassle you on returning it, perform a chargeback. I am amazed that there's been no mention of whether VDM has received a lot of chargebacks from this series of books.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

"as I can't imagine anyone buying this crap for any purpose"

I can't imagine anyone buying items from spam - but they do.

Re:Read the license?

[SendBot]

You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework.

I used to be forced to buy textbooks and know that I was being screwed by my university and the textbook publishers simultaneously. In one year I had to get three different calculus textbooks that basically all had the same contents. Even in middle school I'd find inaccuracies in the textbooks.

Re:Read the license?

[causality]

You know, I hit "Submit" too soon. I wanted to comment on your final paragraph as well:

Sadly instead of empowering books and their content, the advent of print-on-demand will cause people to doubt the once rigid standards books held. And rightfully so with entrepreneurs like VDM waltzing around. Don't think this won't spread or VDM won't set up fronts to publish under to avoid their known muckraked name.

I would love for this to happen. It's about damned time the average person became more savvy and learned that skepticism and the ability to distinguish good information from bad are extremely healthy traits. These things are not burdens that one should resent having to perform; they are privileges. For that matter, it's about time it was widely understood and appreciated that no one has your best interests at heart quite like you do. Over-reliance on someone else to be your "gatekeeper" is for people who need to be spoon-fed and have their information interpreted for them. All of the damage VDM could possibly do to anyone would be a very small price to pay for this. I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I say that if critical thinking became a common skill, it would radically change our society for the better.

Re:Read the license?

[DarkTempes]

Reading material on the toilet paper itself. Brilliant!

Re:Read the license?

[ultranova]

The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so.

If this spam really starts turning up in every Amazon search, I'd imagine a lot more people will be complaining, and eventually looking for alternatives. Someone at Amazon has let greed got to their heads, and is chasing their golden egg laying goose with an axe on hand and a mad glint in the eye.

You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work.

Um, no. People who have no idea what they're talking about - or know but lie intentionally - have never have any problem getting heard. Publishers select books based on how much they'll sell, not on whether or not they're factually correct. If you want the latter, you need to subscribe to a peer-reviewed journal, and even those are ultimately untrustworthy.

If you trust a book just because it's a book then, to put it bluntly, you are an idiot.

Re:Read the license?

[tomhudson]

So do like I did - don't buy the books. If they're "teaching from the book", you're wasting your money on the class - bitch about it as "low-quality education" and drop the course for a better one. If they're not "teaching from the book", you don't need the book.

Re:Read the license?

[tomhudson]

If you trust a book just because it's a book then, to put it bluntly, you are an idiot.

"It was the sound of hundreds of millions of Christians grinding their teeth (and their axes) ..."

Re:Read the license?

[tomhudson]

I would buy toilet paper Wikipedia articles.

Sorry to disappoint you but it's only one article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper

I'll sell you a print version if you really want it.

Re:Read the license?

[LurkerXXX]

Yep. I consider them the digital equivalent of selling bottled water. You know, that stuff that is generally the same stuff that comes out of municipal faucets for pennies.

Re:Read the license?

[aurizon]

Now, let's examine the cost of entry to this market. Why, it costs SFA to enter and with a little smarts you can let your digital slave do all the work.
I bet VDM has many such slaves. I and a million like me go slave hunting. Slave scripts appear online.
Soon, the woods will be full of the sound of book-spam

Re:Read the license?

[517714]

If you make content under Creative Commons or other licenses that allow paid redistribution, you also agree for someone else making money out of it in a suitable way. That is the real freedom and the basis of Creative Commons ShareAlike license - everyone is free to use it as they please, as long as the original author is attributed. If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.

There is no statement of a license compatible with the Creative Commons ShareAlike license in any product listing for these books from any source I could find. If they omitted it from the printed books I believe that would constitute fraud.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

Porno mags don't count.

Re:Read the license?

[Teancum]

Yes, this makes the original Wikipedia authors liable for copyright infringement. This is a point I've made on several other public wikis where sometimes contributors are fast and loose with culling copyrighted content. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects even have a "test" they apply which is simply called the "Google test". If a suspect piece of prose is considered to have been lifted from another source (there are various ways to suspect this), simply post about 10-15 words into Google and check if the text is somewhere else on the internet.

Such passages tend to be removed on the better Wikipedia and Wikibooks articles.

Attribution implies that the source was noted, and that something more than a paraphrasing was turned into a verbatim quote.

As far as making it dangerous to post on Wikipedia, just make sure all of your own personal contributions are original prose. It may take a little more work (compared to those so lazy they just copy whole paragraphs or more from another source), but it keeps you from any sort of liability on the issue.

The Wikimedia Foundation is absolved of any liability as they function more as an internet service provider with the associated protections that come with it. The WMF does have DMCA take-down procedures that have and are being used when copyright violations are formally noticed as well, with the content being deleted not just from the public view but from the administrator's view of the pages as well. Wikipedia itself isn't going to be in any danger at all, but certainly you should be aware of potential liabilities if you contribute.

Re:Read the license?

[SendBot]

I chose a similar solution: I dropped the university for a better life. Very rarely during my time at university did I feel it was worth my time to be there. But *every* moment felt like a huge waste of money.

Even the classes that interested me weren't as valuable as they could be because I had to waste my time doing BS homework for BS classes instead of studying worthwhile things in the depth I would have liked to.

Re:Read the license?

[petermgreen]

The Wikimedia Foundation is absolved of any liability as they function more as an internet service provider with thee associated protections that come with it. The WMF does have DMCA take-down procedures that have and are being used when copyright violations are formally noticed as well
Wikipedia may be able to avoid liability through the DMCA safe harbour but I doubt reusers would have that protection. Especially in the case of reusers that are compiling then selling copies of subsets of the wiki.

Also often the attribution information is available but buried. e.g. an edit summary may say something was moved from another article. Someone checking manually could folow the trail to the history of the other article and get the information but I don't see any real way to automate this.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

Porno mags don't count.

Sure they do. At least the people buying them aren't complaining.

Porn is just real people expressing honest emotions and behavior, presented in an unambiguous and unimpeachable media . Pretty much like VDM. What's the problem there?

Re:Read the license?

[RobertM1968]

In addition, they apparently do not cite the authors. Another violation.

Re:Read the license?

[Darinbob]

88 pages for $46...

I'm pretty sure no one's buying this stuff. Too expensive, nonsense titles. Maybe only some libraries will grab them. What's the motivation here?

Re:Read the license?

[sincewhen]

So, what you are saying is that we should all buy the books VDM publishes, and judge for ourselves?

Won't that reward them, even when we find their products to be lacking?
So, doesn't this become an argument about replacing one reputation system (publishers) with another, or perhaps with none except self-evaluation?

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

You still assume that the average mud-raking, American Idol loving, 65% in debt fool, has any intellect. Sadly it has been bred out of him at quite the expense, for quite some time now. Did you get the memo? It is supposed to produce a more predictable economy. Do your part! Stop asking questions, SPEND SPEND SPEND!

Re:Read the license?

[Blakey Rat]

I can say that Amazon (and Barnes and Noble, and whoever else is carrying this content) isn't going to de-list them until they get a massive PR backlash. They're indirectly making money off of this as much as VDM is.

You could try to get your local consumer advocate news program to cover it, perhaps... that might force Amazon into taking some kind of action.

Re:Read the license?

[Teancum]

I've considered an algorithm that would try to compare edit changes from one version to the next and try to at least attribute who wrote literally each and every word in a Wikipedia article, although you are correct that there are some "soft mergers" that simply do a copy/paste from one article to the next without really giving proper attribution.

Attribution of Wikipedia articles is something that is a big deal in a legal sense, and for precisely the kinds of problems you are noting here that can cause some significant heartburn. I wish there were some way to try and do a survey of how much of the content on Wikipedia that these sort of problems from a copy/paste from a supposedly "legal" copy (i.e. from a GFDL'd or CC-by-SA original source) that was merely moved over without proper attribution on the presumption that since it is all copyleft content nobody minds anyway.

This became an even bigger issue with cross-project content moves where it was openly acknowledged for years that edit histories couldn't be preserved. This is no longer the case as content imports are now mostly enabled between the various projects (an admin-only tool), but not everybody is so careful about the process. I also don't think English Wikipedia has this enabled with the other sister projects as it does chew up a fairly significant amount of CPU bandwidth to perform one of these article imports too, but I may be mistaken on this point as well.

As for resellers, it is a huge deal, or even somebody trying to "fork" Wikipedia. I can't even imagine some of the legal headaches if a significant fraction of the community decided to tell the WMF to shove it and started their own version. This happened, BTW, with the Spanish-language community of Wikipedia.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free.

But let's be clear: you're not saying that the basis for whether you pay for something is whether it's trivial to obtain free or not, correct? That's just might makes right.

Re:Read the license?

[Hadlock]

Throw enough shit at a wall and eventually some of it will stick...
 
At $45-60 per book, the risk:profit ratio is pretty favorable here. Print-on-demand makes it very lucrative since there's no cash up front to start the business, and you can contract out/automate all the printing. Hell, I bet most of those "books" aren't even written/generated; they'll just crunch the data to print if/when someone actually buys one of the "books".

Re:Read the license?

[Yehram Wykah]

I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I say that if critical thinking became a common skill, it would radically change our society for the better.

And rapidly for the best. Competence and contentment is much more actively communicative than prejudices, taboos, ignorances, errors, and badly managed fears.

We only just have now to discover how to get to this so atrociously novel situation.

I like you, you know.

It seems however this website does not support personal messages, so I cannot send you my little love declaration more privately just now.

Do you mind sending an email to deleted.email ATTY ymail DOTTY com, for me to reply?

Re:Read the license?

[Hognoxious]

I'd replace "Christians" with "strict constitutionalists". But then it'd be referring to the same people 99% of the time. I reckon they have double sided placards to save time between their teabagging parties - "socialest healthcare - know way" on one side and "Fetuse's for Jebuses" on the other. If you watch carefully there's always one or two at the back who forget to flip 'em around.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple - sign up, add your own pages of wikipedia as a cost price, with a free ebook version.

Make sure the titles are the same, also put a notice in the descriptions that this is freely available content from wikipedia.

Have a deal with a print-on-demand if someone does order it, (after all, they may want a print out of the article for their school, bound who knows?) they do it at cost for advertising or something.

Re:Read the license?

[David Gerard]

This was actually discussed at length on foundation-l. Basically, as long as they keep to the licence, there isn't much the Wikimedia Foundation or even the individual contributors can do to stop them. That they don't mention Wikipedia is actually in their favour because they then aren't abusing the trademark. Etc., etc.

Unfortunately, freedom to reuse for any purpose includes freedom to cut'n'paste into spam.

Re:Read the license?

[tomhudson]

It's too bad that we don't have a better means of evaluating a persons' knowledge and capabilities. Stuffing people in a room for 4 years and expecting them to be the next generation of innovators is simply not going to work.

And whoever modded you off-topic needs to look at the topic in the larger context.

Re:Read the license?

[causality]

VDM is trying to charge money for a static copy of frequently-updated information that is trivial to obtain for free.

But let's be clear: you're not saying that the basis for whether you pay for something is whether it's trivial to obtain free or not, correct? That's just might makes right.

I hope this is trolling.

"Might makes right" is about using force of some kind. Wikipedia's contributers are writing and editing articles voluntarily. Wikipedia has chosen to use a Creative Commons license voluntarily. They have chosen to publish their articles on wikipedia.org where anyone can read them for free, voluntarily. If I go to that site and enjoy the free articles, which are something they have worked hard to allow anyone to do, I also am doing that voluntarily. None of these activities involve the use of force, so there is no "might" being used.

Like I said, this is so trivial to deconstruct that I hope you are trolling. If not, please find a good book on argumentation and read it.

Re:Read the license?

[rduke15]

Have you ever considered that public water in some areas just tastes bad?

Yes, it does in some places. I have lived in Brussels where tap water was terrible, and I used to buy bottled water there.

Where I live now, the tap water is excellent, yet supermarkets have huge displays of bottled water (some even imported), so I guess many suckers actually do buy it, even though it probably doesn't taste as good as the tap water.

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely Christians don't trust the Bible because it is a book, but rather because the Bible specifically is "the word of God".

Re:Read the license?

[tomhudson]

Surely Christians don't trust the Bible because it is a book, but rather because the Bible specifically is "the word of God".

... and how do they "know" that? Because it says so. Nice example of circular reasoning ...

Re:Read the license?

[causality]

I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I say that if critical thinking became a common skill, it would radically change our society for the better.

And rapidly for the best. Competence and contentment is much more actively communicative than prejudices, taboos, ignorances, errors, and badly managed fears.

We only just have now to discover how to get to this so atrociously novel situation.

I like you, you know.

It seems however this website does not support personal messages, so I cannot send you my little love declaration more privately just now.

Do you mind sending an email to deleted.email ATTY ymail DOTTY com, for me to reply?

That made me laugh. My assumption is that you're male. Unfortunately for you, that means I'm not interested in this "little love declaration". But it was an amusing and thoroughly unusual reply.

Re:Read the license?

[Yehram Wykah]

My assumption is that you're male. Unfortunately for you, that means I'm not interested in this "little love declaration".

Doh, it was just some awkward metaphor :) Although I have to say, while just being a beasty seven digits, I do find you nice six digits quite cute. I find the slightly "off" feeling emanating from you to be, mmmm... very attracting. Yeah.

Ok now, just to be brief, you recently talked about a "dispassionate, intellectually honest inquirer", and having read a few of your other messages, you do seem to be quite rational, at least on some common subjects (I can test you, through very detrimental gory (textual, although horrendously pictorial) extremes, if you accept it). If you have some strong desire to discuss society and its future, in a very rational manner, I would be very glad to procrastinate quite a bit with you by email (the "deleted.email" part of the address is correct, BTW, it was just some temporary email address I had).

I can do it alone, though, so don't you worry too much about me.

I think of you,

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe attribution should include "as seen on Wiki?"

Re:Read the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably what that slashdot troll sopssa does for a living. I'd expect nothing better from euro trash like him

It's Not Just Amazon

[eldavojohn]

Why are we concentrating on Amazon, Barnes and Nobel lists 12,381 results for VDM Verlag as a publisher. On the US Amazon, I see 25,127 for a similar search. The UK's Blackwell just sets it at an even five thou (but what's the real number?). You want infection, take a gander at Abe Books' hilarious 191,042 results on the same search (even putting it in quotes results in that)!

Now before you fall all over yourself to point in horror at the infected zombie Abe Books lumbering your way, lets engage in a simple mental exercise. We hate expensive books. Online retailers know this and they cater to us by giving us near wholesale prices. Good. Now, they shave a little bit off but in their strive to be number one, they rely on large volumes of sales with razor thin profits on each sale. This means that its in the company's (and your) best interest for them to automate book sales for publishers and remove the human element. But also remove the overhead cost that comes with it. And maybe even encourage several thousand books so their marketplace looks vibrant and full of sellers selling anything imaginable.

Enter VDM Verlag. All too happy to profit off of the above situation. They have freely available material to publish and they have end users ready to pay.

I'm not an expert in any of this but my gut tells me that this is what is going on. Go to Borders and note their 4 VDM "books". Now, if the lack of titles was a matter of principle and ethics, there would be zero titles. If they had a difficult to use process to register book sales with them then you would have few books (likely case) and if you were streamlined like Amazon, Abe Books or Blackwell then you hit the hilarious numbers. Everybody hates the big guy but in this case the One-Click-Demon is not really the culprit nor are they the lone retailer.

There's really no way to fix this except consumer awareness. Be aware that your paying an exorbitant fee for something that is just a few keystrokes away and a bit of link clicking.

Can someone help me out with an example of how they came to an author for each particular "book"? I'm having a hard time tracing these people. Some of them appear to be legit authors published through other publishers like (random example) Michael Sage. Other people appear to

Re:It's Not Just Amazon

[sopssa]

What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those? I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents. If someone is legitly offering that (by the creative commons sharealike license), why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?

I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.

Re:It's Not Just Amazon

[eldavojohn]

What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those?

Those what? Wikipedia articles? Someone is but it's only the top 400 articles I think. Anyway, once you print wikipedia it's not wikipedia anymore. Wikis are living documents. It's some sort of Snapshot of a Wiki.

I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents.

Get a printer and get ready to spend lots of money. There are resources out there to help you format wikipedia. But seriously if you want Wikipedia on your bookshelf, burn a snapshot cd (newest ones are torrented) of the HTML and put that in a jewel case and put that on your bookshelf and update it yearly ... for free. Yes, you can't just flip pages but you have it "on your shelf." Although it's cheating, that's your best bet.

I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.

What follows is my opinion. Books tend to fail when they set grandiose objectives. "All of gaming" is setting up an author to fail. Seriously. Hard. Embarrassingly so. That's why we get books limited to dates and ranges and specialties. It's possible. Sometimes you get great books written by groups like the gang of four and they complement each other. Sometimes you get complete trash that is badly titled and that's what's happening in this article.

My advice is not to look for one be-all-end-all book on gaming but instead to seek out the gems that cover your most interested specialties and then augment them with online works. Yes, you have to do work. Like a lot of things there's no silver bullet for something so large. I'm a nerd, such research is fun.

Re:It's Not Just Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

Not hardly. Try mag my Kindle.

Re:It's Not Just Amazon

[cgenman]

You do realize that Wikipedia has at least a page on pretty much every game ever published, plus every publisher, development house, and some individual developers. Here's a partial list of puzzle games on wikipedia, linking to 175 separate multi-page articles on puzzle games alone, and it's not exhaustive. Wikipedia actually has a list of Video Game Lists, with 67 similar articles. Assuming similar numbers of articles, that's already 11,725 multi-page documents to print. Or you could jump right to the source, with the list of all video games, list of all canceled games, and list of all vaporware. It looks like most systems have received between 500 and 5,000 games, and 1/2 of all of those have articles.

Let's pick some numbers. There are about 100 video game platforms out there, and about 1,000 games on each one. Half of those games have articles, and most articles average 4 pages printed. To take into consideration developers and publishers (who usually have really long articles), let's double that again. Now let's assume that 1 piece of paper weighs .013 oz, and is 0.0038 inches thick. Without including other gaming-related articles (spin off series, cartoons, gaming events, etc), you're looking at 400,000 pages. That would weigh in at 325 pounds, and would be 126 feet thick... without covers or bindings. And that's not even all of video games.

Want a professional's estimation? Here's one that's just 5,000 pages printed, covering 3,000 articles. It's about 2 feet tall. The pages are compressed a bit, and double-sided, but nice. That represents the "featured" articles on wikipedia, or about 1 in 1,140. Hence, all 3,242,544 english - speaking articles would print out in a book about 1/2 of a mile long. Of course, for the full 9,474,000 international articles, you'd need a mile-and-a-half long bookshelf.

There really isn't any reason to have a printed version of Wikipedia. Either the information is obscure enough that you wouldn't reasonably be able to include it in a printed copy, or it's so specific that you pretty much have to know it ahead of time to include it in a printed version. It just doesn't work outside of the digital realm, any more than you'd try to get a theater-sized print of every frame of every movie available on Netflix.

Re:It's Not Just Amazon

[erich666]

VDM Publishing itself specializes in print of demand of various people's theses. Something like a vanity press, but as a bonus the authors don't have to pay anything, and VDM takes 80% of the earnings. These are sometimes weak offerings, and often available to download for free, but the practice itself is nothing out of the ordinary. So VDM Publishing's authors really are authors, but of theses and similar.

Alphascript and Betascript Publishing (and Fastbooks, in German) are the Wikipedia-aggregation publishers, imprints of (i.e., marketing names for) VDM Publishing. They entirely avoid the expense of looking around for theses and approaching authors, instead simply sucking related articles from Wikipedia. The book titles are goofy as a result, there are no authors, but the costs are miniscule. With a pool of a few hundred million unsuspecting customers exposed via Amazon and others, it just takes one out of every thousand to misstep to make for a profitable business, one that basically makes money off of people's ignorance. At least cigarettes offer nicotine in addition to lung cancer. To the people who argue, "well, you should just be aware of the problem", this sounds to me like smug "I'd never get fooled, I'm so smart" blather to me. Would you say the same if you were the one who bought such a book? Maybe you would, maybe you're the type of person who blames themselves for getting conned, but I blame the con man.

Speaking of blather, I'm sad that no one's commented on one of the Betascript "editors" names is Lambert M. Surhone, which the Internet Anagram Server turns into "Blather Summoner" as the first match, a great fit for the products offered. My original article on VDM mentions this and other fine anagrams.

One ray of sunshine is that giving these books 1-star ratings on Amazon does kick them down the lists. For example, I gave 1-star ratings to a number of their so-called books on Transnistria on Amazon. 3 of their books were the top three books listed on this subject on Amazon before I rated them, now they appear further down the list.

As far as other firms go, AbeBooks indeed sells Alphascript Publishing (45333) and Betascript Publishing (953) books. Oddly, they are all the same price (vs. those on Amazon, which appear to be priced by the pound), from a few different shops. Borders, to their credit, does not carry any Alphascript or Betascript books. Barnes and Noble does.

I will say one thing for VDM, they do add a tiny bit of value (beyond the wacked titles) in their choices of covers, e.g. this peculiar one for a book on legal disputes about Harry Potter.

Re:It's Not Just Amazon

[Kam Solusar]

What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those? I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such

Since 2009, Wikipedia has a feature that lets you save articles, transform these collections of articles into PDF or OpenDocument files and even order printed book versions of these articles via PediaPress. See this and this page for more information.

welcome to the world of UGC

[alen]

what exactly is Amazon supposed to do here? unless it's something clearly illegal like kiddie porn their model is not to take sides and let people sell their content

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[sourcerror]

Tell in the description that it's collection of printed wikipedia articles.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[FooAtWFU]

If there's a flood of garbage content like this on their website, Amazon suffers from customer perceptions of reduced quality, harming the rest of their (potentially more-profitable) business.

On a vaguely-related note, the Steam "New Games" list would be a lot more interesting if every other entry weren't another $20 RailWorks add-on.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[John Hasler]

> what exactly is Amazon supposed to do here?

They could charge $1 up front for each title listed.

But it's their problem, not ours.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[benjamindees]

and I suppose they should put warnings on all of their movies that they are recycled Shakespearean plays?

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[sourcerror]

Please, which Shakespeare play is about a killing machine sent back from the future?

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[Garble Snarky]

This is a completely nonsensical analogy. If what they were publishing were at all distinct from the actual Wikipedia snapshot, you might have a valid point.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[sourcerror]

If you zoom in the cover image, it tells it's from Wikipedia, however, it isn't mentioned in the Amazon product description, so the angry reviewer might not have noticed it.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[SEWilco]

Please, which Shakespeare play is about a killing machine sent back from the future?

The first was "Steam shalt have returneth", in 1593.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[jack2000]

What are these "pop-cap" games and the like doing on steam? EH, EH? Get this filth away from us!

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[Anonymous Coward]

"what exactly is Amazon supposed to do here?" The solution is simple: just place all these "books" in their own category, and do not show them in general search results. That way they are still for sale as they are not illegal, but they don't spam/poison the general search results. You would have to select the category, then do a search. Of course, spammers will hide and disguise new "books" for sale. It soon will morph into the spam escalation we have seen with email. If they charged a $25 per book setup fee to cover the costs of having a human spending 15 minutes to look over each submission, it would put the brakes on spammers. A legitimate author would be fine with this fee.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[Blakey Rat]

On a vaguely-related note, the Steam "New Games" list would be a lot more interesting if every other entry weren't another $20 RailWorks add-on.

Seriously. Ok, we get it Steam, RailWorks is well-supported and gets new locomotives every week.

Steam needs a 4-tier system:
1) Game collections (the id Super Pack)
2) Full games
3) Game expansions (Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising)
4) Game content (new locomotives for RailWorks, the infamous horse armor for Oblivion)

Of course there's always fuzziness (for example, is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky* a sequel or an expansion?), but at least that way we could filter some of the crap out.

And while I'm ranting mostly-off-topic, maybe Steam shouldn't blow its wad on New Years sales, then have *zero* decent sales for the first 6 months of the year.

* (At least they finally fixed the bug where the original game was named S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but Clear Sky was named STALKER, meaning they didn't alphabetize anywhere close to each other. Now if only they'd rename "The Ultimate DOOM" so it appears somewhere less than 30 miles from DOOM II and DOOM 3, where I'd expect to find it...)

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[Anonymous Coward]

There are significant setup costs for print-on-demand books, paid to the actual on-demand printer--$50+ per title, in my experience. (It's basically just to have a human being move the TIF cover and PDF of the book block from the FTP site onto a separate, completely secure machine connected to the printer itself, and verify that the dimensions/layout match, AFAIK.) VDM could have purchased their own POD machines, or be getting quantity discounts from a POD printer; but either way, a few extra dollars per title wouldn't stop them.

Re:welcome to the world of UGC

[dangitman]

hat exactly is Amazon supposed to do here? unless it's something clearly illegal like kiddie porn their model is not to take sides and let people sell their content

What the fuck are you talking about? Very recently, Amazon has delisted the entire offerings (both print and electronic) of a major publisher because they disagreed with their pricing on Kindle ebook titles. Amazon has also threatened to delist the entire catalog of other publishers who disagree with their Kindle pricing.

Given the above behavior, what is to stop Amazon from delisting all VDM publications? It's not like VDM is even close to being in the league of the publishers that have already been threatened. I think your view of Amazon is entirely too charitable.

web browser in kindle is free to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth buy these articles when you can have them for free in the kindle's built in web browser?

Re:web browser in kindle is free to use

[tepples]

Why on earth buy these articles when you can have them for free in the kindle's built in web browser?

Not all countries have Kindle with free web browsing, and not everybody even in supported countries can afford Kindle.

Re:web browser in kindle is free to use

[517714]

Why on earth buy these articles when you can have them for free in the kindle's built in web browser?

Not all countries have Kindle with free web browsing, and not everybody even in supported countries can afford Kindle.

And how would these these people buy from Amazon.com?

Re:web browser in kindle is free to use

[tepples]

You can buy from an online bookstore on a home PC, a work PC during break time, or a public library PC. But even if you have a home PC, you're not always in the same room as it, and there might be more people than PCs in your household.

Re:web browser in kindle is free to use

[einhverfr]

Still, the VDM books are EXPENSIVE for what they offer. I wouldn't mind offering to reprint public domain works, but their books are way out of what a reasonable price range would be....

Re:web browser in kindle is free to use

[dangitman]

Not all countries have Kindle with free web browsing, and not everybody even in supported countries can afford Kindle.

If they can't afford a Kindle, then how can they afford the outrageous prices of these VDM titles, plus shipping?

VDM?

[the_humeister]

Made me think of venereal disease...

I'm so tempted...

[BitterOak]

I'm really tempted to buy a copy of that skiing book. It might really be worth something, someday. Especially if Amazon drops this publisher. At the very least, with a title like that it would be a great conversation starter as a coffee table book.

Re:I'm so tempted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get any old book at a thrift store for 25 cents. Then print out the cover of the Biscuit Skiing book and glue it on the cheap book. And save over $45. :-)

The obvious question

[DiamondGeezer]

Will the publisher be liable if the Wikishit they sell proves to be libelous, defamatory or gratuitously wrong?

Re:The obvious question

[Tapewolf]

If, as seems to be the case, they're reprinting wikipedia texts about Scientology, it could get very interesting to watch: http://www.amazon.com/Scientology-Legal-System-Intellectual-Defamation/dp/6130327315

Re:The obvious question

[thinusp]

1 - If publishers were liable for publishing demonstrably false information, it wouldbe a lot harder to find a copy of the holy bible.

then please demonstrate this demonstrably false information so we can settle this debate once and for all.

T

Re:The obvious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Try here for starters.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Half man half biscuit

[heffrey]

I can assure you that half man half biscuit are not computer generated. Do some research!

Re:Half man half biscuit

[Anonymous Coward]

Next on Amazon, Joy Division Oven Gloves?

Who would buy one of those books?

[jtownatpunk.net]

Seriously. I'm asking for reals. Anyone with a room-temperature IQ (or higher) would look at those listings and say, "What the Hell is this crap?"

Generally, when I purchase something online, I either know exactly what I want or I base my purchasing decision on the description and reviews. These titles have absolutely nothing that would lead me to believe they would be useful or even interesting. A few random facts and that's it. There's nothing in those descriptions that would induce a rational, intelligent person to complete the purchase.

I'd say VDM is doing the world a favor by shifting a small bit of wealth away from people who are clearly too stupid to manage it. Maybe we should take the list of buyers and 5150 them.

Re:Who would buy one of those books?

[JustOK]

a room-temperature IQ (or higher)

Fahrenheit or celsius?

Re:Who would buy one of those books?

[fucket]

If it's Kelvin, we're screwed.

Re:Who would buy one of those books?

[JustOK]

why, is he stewpid?

Re:Who would buy one of those books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kelvin

Re:Who would buy one of those books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kelvin.

FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Alex Belits]

Regardless of all possible problems or lack of ones with licensing, it is obvious that the purpose of this "publishing" is fraudulent, as publisher relies on customers believing that those "books" are not random compilation of Wikipedia articles.

However since this publisher apparently "infected" all online book stores, Amazon will do nothing, as it doesn't make Amazon any less attractive for the customers than its equally shitted-up competitors. The only solution is to clarify the law that would make this kind of fraud trump publisher's "freedom of speech", just like many other kinds of fraud should.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Trepidity]

It's possible it does already violate the law, since misrepresenting a product is already not covered by the First Amendment. One problem is that the only people who could complain are those who were actually misled: customers who genuinely thought the book was legit from the description, and only after purchasing it found it to be auto-generated crap. But they most likely can just return the book, so don't have a very strong complaint either.

Really the main people harmed are customers who never get misled into buying the book, but just find their search results spammed up. Sadly, spamming up your Amazon search results is not a crime. Amazon itself ideally should care, if they want their results to be useful, but so far they seem not to. Maybe if it got bad enough, so e.g. these crap books were 50% of their books, they would?

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[John Hasler]

It is costing Amazon money by consuming their resources and distracting customers who may give up and go away rather than buying something. However, if Amazon is willing to tolerate it, that's their business.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[sourcerror]

I have to repeat myself:
"f you zoom in the cover image, it tells it's from Wikipedia, however, it isn't mentioned in the Amazon product description, so the angry reviewer might not have noticed it."

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Nemyst]

I wonder... What if someone were to make thousands of "books" consisting entirely of computer-generated high-profile keywords (IE spam) with no value, no purpose and no use and submit those to Amazon using print-on-demand, hence spamming the search results to death with fake results, what would they do?

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[linzeal]

Piratebay has an ebook store without the infection, I guess I will shop there.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[erich666]

Good point, to some extent: Barnes and Noble carries Alphascript Publishing books in their online catalog, Borders does not.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Anonymous Coward]

Money laundering isn't protected speech.

Oh, you didn't know? This is a money laundering / CC liquidating system. They put out a bunch of garbage books, the dirty money is used to buy them, the clean money comes out the other side.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Alex Belits]

It does not matter what anyone did or did not notice. One single question should be asked -- "Would a sane and reasonable person who understood the nature of this product, buy it at the given price?" If the answer is no, it's a fraud. Everything else should be completely irrelevant.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Alex Belits]

It's quite possible that it's used for this particular scheme.

The problem is, proving that such a scheme is being used, is difficult, time-consuming and likely requires plenty of co-operation between multiple countries' law enforcement. On the other hand, evidence that sales are fraudulent -- be it to unsuspecting Amazon customers or partners in money laundering schemes -- is already there, available for everyone to see.

Same applies to, say, shady "send-us-gold-and-we'll pay you" companies -- it's very likely that jewelry thieves use them to evade police, and it's possible that some of them are created just for this purpose. However it would be easier to bust them if massive disparity with market price and underhanded "negotiation" tactics were already clearly illegal for companies that trade in something as easy to abuse as precious metals.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[sourcerror]

This is pretty much the nanny state approach. Please don't tell me what sane people should or shouldn't do.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[Alex Belits]

I am not a Libertarian.

Re:FUHHHREEEEEDOOOM OFFFF SPEEEEEAAAACH!!!111

[sourcerror]

I am not either. (If you care to read my posts on this site, you'll see I am social-democrat.)

VDM are Spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply book spam, a new form we're not used to seeing. The conditions are all there: it's randomly generated nonsense blasted to as many people as possible with the intent of getting money from them. Ergo, it's spam.

Although they're certainly free to use Wikipedia content, the problem people have with them is that they're spammers. Nobody likes spammers. We're not against them because of how they generate their messages from a mish-mash of other texts, we're against them because they're spamming us and making it hard for real people to communicate.

Re:VDM are Spammers

[causality]

This is simply book spam, a new form we're not used to seeing. The conditions are all there: it's randomly generated nonsense blasted to as many people as possible with the intent of getting money from them. Ergo, it's spam.

Although they're certainly free to use Wikipedia content, the problem people have with them is that they're spammers. Nobody likes spammers. We're not against them because of how they generate their messages from a mish-mash of other texts, we're against them because they're spamming us and making it hard for real people to communicate.

This is part of what I meant when I said I believe it deserves to fail because it's without merit. I don't view it as morally wrong but I don't believe it should be rewarded either. The best way to discourage this behavior is for VDM to waste their time and money on it. If that happens, others who might be inclined to do the same thing will take notice that it has been tried and has failed.

I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business. I am not going to see any of VDM's products unless I go to such a place of business and search for books. If I go to say, Wal-mart and see advertisements for products Wal-mart carries, those ads might or might not be annoying and might or might not worsen my shopping experience, but I would not call them spam. If all spam worked this way, we would not have a situation where over 90% of SMTP traffic is due to spammers.

Though I believe they are shoddy, these are legitimate products that are being sold at a legitimate store. Amazon and other booksellers offer these books because they have voluntarily made agreements with VDM, not because they need to use more sophisticated captchas. I think your real issue is with Amazon and other online businesses that are providing VDM a forum. If it annoys enough of their customers, they will probably cease.

For what it's worth, I don't like this company or its practices any more than you do. I just think "spam" is a strong word, and should be, but becomes weakened by using it where it doesn't really apply. It's sort of like what has happened to words like "lady" or "gentleman".

Re:VDM are Spammers

[The boojum]

I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business.

Maybe you haven't seen it yet, but I've received a number of e-mails from Amazon announcing "new books" from these guys with titles referring to topics that I'm interested in. Yes, I can opt-out of such e-mails from Amazon but automatic notification of new books in my field is a useful service to me, and it's led directly to Amazon getting sales out of me because they provide it.

So yes, it does lead to spam of a form, and I think Amazon needs to handle this very carefully.

Re:VDM are Spammers

[Matt Perry]

Just because you aren't interested in the books you think it's spam? Who opted in to receive the emails from Amazon? You?

Re:VDM are Spammers

[LihTox]

Just because you aren't interested in the books you think it's spam? Who opted in to receive the emails from Amazon? You?

Just because you aren't interested in Viagra you think it's spam? Who opted to have an email account? You?

These aren't a problem if they are a niche offering, but if every search I make on Amazon winds up containing 10 or 20 of these, then that's interfering with Amazon's business and they're going to have to deal with it somehow.

Re:VDM are Spammers

[Matt Perry]

Just because you aren't interested in Viagra you think it's spam? Who opted to have an email account? You?

That's something completely different. In your case you opted to receive offers from Amazon, so they send the offers to you. If you don't like the products that they suggest, then take yourself of their mailing list and take your business elsewhere. It's not spam. You opted in and you can out out.

These aren't a problem if they are a niche offering, but if every search I make on Amazon winds up containing 10 or 20 of these, then that's interfering with Amazon's business and they're going to have to deal with it somehow.

Then tell them that. Maybe they can find a way to allow users to fine tune or filter suggestions.

Re:VDM are Spammers

[LihTox]

I'm not really talking about the emailed offers from Amazon, but about the potential for these books to poison Amazon search in general, so let's use a different analogy: these books are the equivalent to spamdexing sites, filled with ads, which try to game Google's system and get highly ranked in unrelated searches. There's nothing illegal about either practice, it's up to the company to fix it if they want to keep their product usable, and we users can always go elsewhere if we find it annoying... but that doesn't keep me from finding both practices to be loathsome and unethical.

Size of Amazon's Book Catalog

[LegoEvan]

> 27 million. Just go to amazon.com, choose the books department to the left of the search bar, don't enter anything in the search field, and press go. So that reduces the significance by a factor of 10. That said, it's still 0.2%, which is quite high considering they're not a traditional publisher.

Re:Size of Amazon's Book Catalog

[oldhack]

I wonder how many of those are "* For Dummy" titles.

Re:Size of Amazon's Book Catalog

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I wonder how many of those are "* For Dummy" titles.

Might I recommend to those buying these compilation books that instead, they start with this For Dummies book?

Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of article is exactly why the open source/copyleft movement doesn't get taken seriously. Free use is only respected when it's someone the neckbeard hivemind loves, cue stories like this or the once-a-year like clockwork furor about Windows containing fragments of BSD. It's especially laughable that somewhere like Slashdot, which prides itself on devotion to the movement, joins in the rage and betrays both readers' and editors' complete incomprehension of the licenses they're constantly on about as ideals.
This isn't even new, most major booksellers have been carrying print-on-demand copies of -manpages-, usually out of date at printing and definitely so within a few months, for over a decade. Charging $15 or so, too. But that was wonderful because it was retail exposure for Linux, wasn't it?

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[tomhudson]

I like my "linux in a nutshell" book, you insensitive clod!

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[causality]

This kind of article is exactly why the open source/copyleft movement doesn't get taken seriously. Free use is only respected when it's someone the neckbeard hivemind loves, cue stories like this or the once-a-year like clockwork furor about Windows containing fragments of BSD. It's especially laughable that somewhere like Slashdot, which prides itself on devotion to the movement, joins in the rage and betrays both readers' and editors' complete incomprehension of the licenses they're constantly on about as ideals.

So the ideals of freedom and openness, and the efforts to have it in the realm of information are invalid because a very small minority of people will abuse it and try to exploit it for their own selfish gain? That's such a disheartening viewpoint that I hope I am grossly misinterpreting you. If you really do feel that way, please reconsider. The whole concept of freedom is that it's so precious that it's worth the occasional asshat, many times over, even if people fail to take it seriously.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have an excellent chance of being seen as invalid when even their proponents add the caveat "...but this free access only counts if we like you". Either you believe works being free for use is a good thing, or you don't, and the abject rage whenever someone puts a price tag on GPLed/copylefted works smacks of the movement considering the concept a weapon against entrenched publishers rather than a goal. If you're terming something that the lawyers that wrote the license considered a positive feature "abuse" and an opportunity for "selfish gain", perhaps you should reconsider your position on copyright and support French-style stricter rather than looser copyright laws with a moral right clause.

Ironically, these people are almost definitely outsourcing their printing, and probably not even generating a layout until after an order. If it's so bothersome, why not run the same wget->latex->gs chain they do, undercut by half a dollar, and donate all proceeds to Wikipedia?

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why socialism doesn't work, yes.

It's not that people sell each other out for 0.05 pence, though a very small percentage who it's usually fairly easy to see coming wil given half a chance. It's because at the top of the pyramid, all of those 0.05 pences add up to millions, and given the choice between siphoning off 5% of those millions to make their own families lives a little easier, and suffering along with the masses, most people put their own family first. That's all the corruption it takes to produce a Stalin, or a Mao.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to capitalism, where the corruption occasionally repaid with a bullet is instead profit which should be taken as virtue.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but liberalism and capitalism do (depending on your definitions of liberalism and capitalism) admit that you need checks and balances (courts and such) to try and keep things on an even keel, whereas naivety gets you straight to a dictatorship most of the time.

Life just isn't simple, Einstein was right that "simpler than it can be", doesn't work, and I would assert that socialism/anarchism is simpler than the real world allows.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

The notion that man is reliably a rational actor is similarly simplistic and solidly disproven. The underpinning of classical liberalism that man, unmolested, has no master is likewise only feasible in an agrarian society with no scarcity of land or potential for crop failure.

All of this, however, still has no bearing on the fact that "corruption" and "profit" are just a negative and positive way to refer to the strong man's same extra cut. Citing it as a unique feature of socialism is akin to arguing that the civilian death penalty is a unique flaw of capitalism, as under socialism every man is a soldier of the revolution.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[causality]

They have an excellent chance of being seen as invalid when even their proponents add the caveat "...but this free access only counts if we like you". Either you believe works being free for use is a good thing, or you don't, and the abject rage whenever someone puts a price tag on GPLed/copylefted works smacks of the movement considering the concept a weapon against entrenched publishers rather than a goal. If you're terming something that the lawyers that wrote the license considered a positive feature "abuse" and an opportunity for "selfish gain", perhaps you should reconsider your position on copyright and support French-style stricter rather than looser copyright laws with a moral right clause.

Ironically, these people are almost definitely outsourcing their printing, and probably not even generating a layout until after an order. If it's so bothersome, why not run the same wget->latex->gs chain they do, undercut by half a dollar, and donate all proceeds to Wikipedia?

For an analogy, my views on this are similar to my views on free speech. I may strongly dislike an opinion that you express, but that does not give me the right to attempt to censor you. Instead, the way to handle that is to use persuasion, or to challenge you with an example of what I believe is better speech. Likewise, I think this is a rather selfish use of Wikipedia's information, but I don't believe it should be prevented. It is clearly the intention of Wikipedia that such uses be allowed, and their freedom to make that decision is more important to me than my personal opinion of this particular use. If the "proponents" you mention don't understand this and are as petty as you suggest then they merely hinder themselves.

This discussion is actually an iteration of a general worldview. It's a shame that in many conversations about freedom, there is an such an undue emphasis on personal opinions. The unstated assumption is that they are more important than the concern for freedom. I can see that the root of this is a desire to control others, to have them do only the things of which you would approve. It's contagious and so prevalent that everyone has to interact with it in some way, either to acknowledge and reject it or to be conditioned to accept it as normal. Apparently the latter choice is more popular, as there are not many who would seriously defend (otherwise harmless) speech with which they strongly disagree. Most would either do nothing or try to silence the speaker.

I see that this is the norm. The environment created by such a norm makes it all too easy to overlook the significance of claims I never made. So I can't count it against you that it seems logical to you that I'd advocate stronger copyright controls, since that would amount to using the force of law to prevent something not because it's wrong, but because I dislike it. I'm hoping you can see that my position is not what you may have expected. Interpreted in that light, some of my statements should make more sense. If VDM stops doing this, I want it to be because they change their minds and agree with me that they can do better, not because someone made a law to stop them.

Incidentally, I don't like what VDM is doing because I believe they are charging a high price for a shoddy, low-quality product when the high-quality version is available for free. I would not use words like "exploitative" if I believed they were doing anything to actually earn that money. I consider this to ultimately be a matter that is between VDM and its customers. I am merely explaining why I won't be one of them.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're on a site that bills itself as a leading open-source meeting of minds, and the headline is that this publisher is "infecting" Amazon. I think that handles the pettiness qualification.

Arguing that there's an undue emphasis on personal opinion in conversations about freedom is, itself, a personal opinion, though. For that matter, defining freedom is almost completely a matter of such. Even just on the topic of moral rights to a work, is it an abridgment of my freedom to put me in the position of being coerced to sell the final say over what will be my last remnant on earth, or is it an abridgment of my freedom to deny me the opportunity?

That's a fool's question. The answer is "both", and that's why these conversations always turn to weight of opinion.

Re:Yes, let's ruin our credibility.

[causality]

We're on a site that bills itself as a leading open-source meeting of minds, and the headline is that this publisher is "infecting" Amazon. I think that handles the pettiness qualification.

I can't be responsible for what headline the Slashdot editor chose to write. It was not my decision. What I can do is provide a counter-example if I think it's petty. What I can do is to decide not to allow a thing like that to prevent me from joining this discussion. Besides, it's not hard for me to understand why that description was chosen. The willingness to understand where something comes from independently of whether you like it is vastly underrated.

Arguing that there's an undue emphasis on personal opinion in conversations about freedom is, itself, a personal opinion, though.

The moment I see anyone try to censor otherwise harmless speech because they disagree with it, at that time their disagreement becomes more than an opinion because they are trying to back it with force. Something similar happens here when it's assumed I would want French-style copyright laws that can be used to prevent VDM from reselling Wiki's data.

Even just on the topic of moral rights to a work, is it an abridgment of my freedom to put me in the position of being coerced to sell the final say over what will be my last remnant on earth, or is it an abridgment of my freedom to deny me the opportunity?

That's a fool's question. The answer is "both", and that's why these conversations always turn to weight of opinion.

I don't think that renders a discussion about freedom into a meaningless exchange of opinions. I think it just illustrates the disadvantages of trying to frame important concerns into either-or questions. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle because there's a third option you are neglecting. If you are concerned with how others will use your copyrighted work, release it under a license that forbids those uses. Just understand that if you contribute to Wikipedia, you are agreeing with their license.

Incidentally, this is not a "fair use" or "moral rights" issue. If you thought it was, then we can easily resolve our disagreement. Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons license. By contributing to Wikipedia, you are releasing your work under that license. That license explicitly allows what VDM is doing. That's part of its design. It's right there in black-and-white in the Creative Commons license, and is not an implied thing like a moral right or an instance of fair use.

New money-making scheme

[Smallpond]

1) Vandalize the wikipedia article about yourself
2) Order the print-on-demand book
3) Sue VDM for libel
4? Profit!

Re:New money-making scheme

[jack2000]

That would be interesting to watch, also aren't there trolltastic vandalisations about current events(whenever that may be) that could land VDM in quite some trouble.

Re:New money-making scheme

[mkiwi]

While VDM's strategy is "interesting," they are going to have some problems making this work. If they steer clear of copyright infringement, they are fine.

However, if they are automating the production of these books without checking for copyrighted material, Company A will not be happy when they find their copyrighted material in there. Not to mention that being a "legitimate" business puts a massive litigation target on their back. Since the material is print there is no more DMCA slap on the wrist. In other words, do not be around them when the shit --> fan.

Just imagine how the RIAA or MPAA could exploit this.

Re:New money-making scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Oi! Darl! Are you listening?

Re:New money-making scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the material is print there is no more DMCA slap on the wrist. In other words, do not be around them when the shit --> fan.

Excerpts from the VDM novel Fecal Matter and Oscillating Blades

When the shit hits the fan is usually used to refer to a specific time of confrontation or trouble, which requires decisive action. This is often used in reference to combat situations and the action scenes in movies, but can also be used for everyday instances that one might be apprehensive about. I don't want to be here when the shit hits the fan! indicates that the speaker is dreading this moment (which can be anything from an enemy attack to confronting an angry parent or friend). He's the one to turn to when the shit hits the fan is an indication that the person being talked about is dependable and will not run from trouble or abandon their allies in tough situations. The concept of this phrase is simple enough, as the actual substance striking the rotating blades of a fan would cause a messy and unpleasant situation (much like being in the presence of a manure spreader). Whether or not this has actually happened, or if the concept is simply feasible enough for most people to imagine the result without needing it to be demonstrated, is unknown. Another example might be the saying shit rolls down hill which is particularly illustrating, the consequences of putting your superiors in a bad position at work. There are a number of anecdotes and jokes about such situations, as the imagery of these situations is considered to be funny. This is generally tied-in with the concept that disgusting and messy substances spilled onto someone else are humorous.

$59.99, only at Amazon.com

Yust a torsketunger minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit" is a good and fine and upstanding Norwegian family name you insensitive clods!!!

So little outsidenkulturevergnugen you feheraveylander peepolen hat!!!!

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!

[alanw]

Look for anything on Amazon by one or more of Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, and Susan F. Marseken

"Showing 1 - 12 of 18,308 Results" for just Surhone alone

For instance

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Battlecrab-Spacecraft-Humanoid-Technomage/dp/6130461658

A rip off of a Wikipedia page on Babylon 5, or

http://www.amazon.com/Valgrind-Programming-Debugger-Performance-Debugging/dp/613052904X

Re:High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!

[Tapewolf]

This looks like the best one I've seen so far: http://www.amazon.com/USS-Dempsey-26-Insert-subtitle/dp/613037867X

This might actually be a pretty good development.

[aix tom]

I really hope they succeed. When a PUBLISHER can make money by publishing stuff that is actually free to get from somewhere else, that would pretty much contradict the preaching of the MPAA/RIAA that publishers can only make money when they put heavy DRM on their stuff and lock it down as much as possible.

And it *might* actually be a sensible service to offer. Putting together articles / web pages you need for something, and order a reasonably priced hardcopy of them might actually wind up up being cheaper than printing them on consumer printers.

worth publishing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been published nor produced anything worth publishing.

That hasn't stopped a lot of other people from publishing. :)

Well could be funny as a novelty

[Nicolas MONNET]

For the Babylon 5 fan or something, if it's nicely printed.

Indeed

[mutube]

May I suggest this book as a starting point?

Its an infestation

[unity100]

computer generated meshes of articles are as good as spam. if amazon doesnt take necessary precautions, more than half of their index of books will be comprised of VDM shit soon.

Circle jerk

[mutube]

Does this mean Wikipedia articles can now cite themselves in book form as authoritative sources? Super-holy-shit-vicious-circle Batman!

Re:Circle jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear sir, could you please not use the term "circle jerk" on slashdot.org? It presents a very ugly mental picture.

Re:Circle jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg, I heard you like Wikipedia articles, so we put a Wiki in your...... oh, nevermind.

Re:Circle jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

Things are gonna get interesting when VDM publishes the Wikipedia article about them.

Ha Ha Ha Ha

[cdrguru]

When content is available for free, someone will take it and make money with it.

Here we have a bunch of text often with inaccuracies, distortions and lies. But it is a lot of text. That should be worth something, right? So we have a company taking that because it is free to take and making money from it.

This should be the first guidepost for those that would like to remove copyright protection from things. They will be picked up by companies like this and sold. So if your music is free to download and do whatever with. expect to find someone selling CDs of it somewhere. Might just be at a flea market, might be on Amazon or WalMart.

Is it right? Well, the door WAS left open. If you wanted to retain control you wouldn't have used a Creative Commons license now would you? So without that control, someone is going to make money with it. Maybe not a lot of money and maybe not very ethically, but it will happen. And there is nothing that can be done about it.

Think they will make a lot of money from this? I doubt it. But just wait until the blogs of someone that licenses them with Creative Commons start showing up on Amazon as their "Collected Writings". Going to happen sooner or later.

French meaning...

[Fantasio]

In French, VDM stands for "Vie De Merde", which means "Shitty Life". Appropriate

Re:This might actually be a pretty good developmen

[sourcerror]

Wow, I imagine sending a handwritten HTTP request to the publisher, who sends me the book, containing the page!

Check this one out...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.amazon.com/XKCD-Independent-Contractor-Mathematical-Apollonian/dp/6130409834

Re:Check this one out...

[NemosomeN]

Ouch, they could, somewhat hilariously, be in trouble for trademark violations for some of these books. I'm sure xkcd isn't a registered trademark, but if it were, and I'm sure other examples are, they could get sued to titling their book "XKCD" as they have.

Re:Check this one out...

[Jesus_666]

Hmm. I wonder is Randall knows about this. Might at least end up in a strip.

Re:This might actually be a pretty good developmen

[CAIMLAS]

These books are not likely to sell all that well on account of their computer-generated nature. People will buy them expecting one thing (on an impulse buy), and get something else.

On the other hand, if a publisher were to undertake the same thing this company is BUT have their books be topical while being accurately targeted...

For instance, you could make a selection of books such as:

* The Thralls of Greece - Greece, Past and Present
* Castles of the World
* Indigenous Cultures of The World
* Common Diseases
* Plants of North America
* Pocket Guide to British Columbia
* Military Ships of the Victorian
* History of the British Royal Family

And so on. Granted, it would take a fair amount of human selection to get a quality publication, but such a publication would likely sell pretty well. No, they'd not be in-depth but they would provide a good high-level topical look at things which do not get covered in such detail in, say, a typical encyclopedia. There are many books out there that do this already, yes. But those sell; why couldn't these?

If you edit Wikipedia, you agreed to this.

[NemosomeN]

I'm tired of groups choosing liberal licenses, then getting butt-hurt when people follow them, and use them to their advantage. If you don't want people to take your work and use it for their own gain, GPL, BSD, and CC may not be for you (Though CC has some licenses that may be). I contacted a project owner for a bid sniper for eBay that was warning people that they couldn't take his source code and produce their own product from it, but he had licensed it as GPL. He responded with anger, saying how dare I tell him what he had agreed to do (I had no intention of making my own product, I don't even have an eBay account). My only intention was to tell him he'd chosen the wrong license for what he intended to do. I'm sick and god-damned tired of people picking licenses they do not understand or truly agree to.

Re:If you edit Wikipedia, you agreed to this.

[greenreaper]

It's not the Wikipedians who are complaining about this - it's the idiots who bought the books (never mind that Amazon probably gave them a refund).

Re:If you edit Wikipedia, you agreed to this.

[NemosomeN]

Sounds to me like the bitchers are bitching. Par for the course.

Re:If you edit Wikipedia, you agreed to this.

[erich666]

Idiot or not, having been ripped off by a Dilbert book on Amazon (turned out to be one of those tiny gift books you see at checkouts, not a real collection - foolish me, I should have read the dimensions of the book, it was right there on Amazon), it does cost time and money to return your book to Amazon for a refund.

Re:If you edit Wikipedia, you agreed to this.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Wikipedia contributor, I don't give a shit if someone does this with some of my work.

What pisses me off is this is making Amazon search less useful. Notice how Google is filled with wikipedia ripoffs that pushes other relevant information onto the 9th page?

Re:If you edit Wikipedia, you agreed to this.

[NemosomeN]

That would normally piss me off, but I don't buy books from Amazon, only other goods. *shrugs*

Under that CC license

[Ed Peepers]

... can't anyone resell the VDM content (which they have so generously compiled for you) at a slightly lower cost? It seems like their low margin business model relies on "owning" the very content they're repackaging. Oh the irony!

Amazon can help here

[davidwr]

They can provide a checkbox, off by default, that says "include low-selling titles." For logged-in users they can provide user-specified thresholds of what "low selling" means.

I would recommend a default of something like "has sold more than 10,000 copies worldwide in any edition, at least 1,000 in the last year in any edition, and at least 100 copies in Amazon in any edition" -OR- "in the last 12 months, author has received advanced or earned royalties representing at least 10,000 copies and at least $5,000."

Of course, the term "any edition" can be gamed but I'm sure Amazon can work on that later.

Other possible checkboxes:
___ Include novelty press
___ Include publish on demand
_X_ Include all non-POD, non-novelty works (checked by default)

Interesting thoughts on openness

[KingAlanI]

Kudos to you, Mr. Coward.
True openness shall sometimes lead to apparent "non-openness"

Seeking 'openness' for its own sake seems to me to be, ironically, just as close-minded.

It seems only logical that there's some room for both, especially if you're really looking at each individual product on its own merits.
If the independent/open model inherently produced better results like it supposedly does, than that will show itself.

(I find music label discussions to be an analogue or component of these issues, as my signature refers to.)

VDM wanted to publish my Master's thesis!

[Anonymous Coward]

A few months after I finished my master's degree I got contacted on Facebook by a VDM representative who wanted me to publish my thesis with them. I was incredulous -- what respectable publishing company contacts people on Facebook??

Upon Googling it turns out that VDM is a very shady vanity press. They employ people who go through university websites looking for things to publish (anything will do; there is no quality control). The author gets 5 free copies, and VDM puts the manuscript up on Amazon for hundreds of dollars. The author receives some percentage of sales, but only if they exceed some amount (a few hundred, IIRC), which they probably never will. Otherwise the author gets nothing.

See here for a long thread (complete with VDM sock puppets!) of other people's experience with VDM.

Re:VDM wanted to publish my Master's thesis!

[ZorroXXX]

My experience with VDM is positive. My master thesis (written in 2006) got published last year, Someone actually doing systematic non-functional software maintenance. It is not a 100% copy of the master thesis, I did a few adaptations to make it into a book.

As an author you receive one free copy, not five. The list price on my book is $73 on amazon, which is not cheap but it is not hundreds of dollars. Truely I will not receive any cash payment unless the book sells above some threshold, but hey - for me just having my own book published is very cool.

And if the book sells below the payout threshold you can use the earned amount to buy other books from VDM. There are many to chose from and one that is on my list of books I would like to buy then is Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.

Not really

[RobertLTux]

SHADOW VESSELS ARE NEVER REFERRED TO AS CRABS!!

Shadow "spider" nightmare but never in any of the material from any source connected to B5 as Crabs

Re:Not really

[jack2000]

Spacecraft-humanoid-technomage come on! You gotta buy anything with that in the title :D

It does to one thing for academics...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most professors do not allow the use of Wikipedia for sources, but since this is a published book... it makes Wikipedia a valid book source!!!

and pay us

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon's response to date has been, 'As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.' The words 'and pay us' were left out.

Yes they left out the words "and pay us" because when they say they want to encourage selection, they are serious. Idiot.

Half Man Half Biscuit

[tregeagle]

Publicity for a great band, not much of a book if it is taken from the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Man_Half_Biscuit
Better off listening to the Trumpton Riots EP instead.

Call it what it is: SPAM

[cowtamer]

I have not had the misfortune of buying one of their books, but if I were Amazon or B&N, I would do something about this book equivalent of SPAM (something which costs NOTHING to produce that you can posts thousands of, with the proviso that you print it when someone shells out $60...).

The sad thing is, as long as you post enough of these on Amazon, you will make money. The scheme will multiply. I'm sure they'll fix it (perhaps require that they send a single printed & bound copy and have a human look over it for not being absolute drivel) -- because it sounds VERY annoying...

It has already happened

[the_raptor]

Wikipedia citing a newspaper that was citing wikipedia has already happened, and been discussed on /.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/10/2211220

Re:It has already happened

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it's the same, but I noticed a number of hits from the Finnish language Wikipedia into one of my entries. Turns out I was cited as a source in the Finnish article. The entry itself was written using quite a bit of material from the English version of the article that was quoting me in the Finnish version, so...

I hadn't explicitly noted Wikipedia as a source, but I had linked my entry to the English Wikipedia article on relevant keywords.

The solution: competitors

[acheron12]

As with any get rich quick scheme, a bunch of copycats will show up doing the same thing only at slightly lower prices. This will solve the problem. How? Well as the copycats compete the prices of these "books" will keep on dropping until profit is minimal, at which point the service offered - nicely bound hard copies of Wiki articles - will actually be worthwhile. With any luck, they'll start bundling the articles into more logical collections too.

Write-only publications

[Anonymous Coward]

There are more of these write-only publishers. Icon Group International is another one. I blogged about these http://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com/2010/01/massive-write-only-publications.html in January. Philip M Parker has a patent on the production of such books, and had over 100.000 entries on Amazon when I checked. I find it outrageous that Amazon doesn't cut these guys out - they removed a German publisher for not paying extortion listing fees, but had to put them back over protests. Of course, when anyone orders one of these doorstops, Amazon earns a few pennies.

There are so many of them, you need a bot to enter in one-star entries that say: This is an expensive, computer-generated book containing material you can obtain free on the Internet. On the other hand, that might be an idea - fight fire with fire.

Re:Write-only publications

[erich666]

Wow, fantastic article, thanks! The problem is much worse than I previously thought: search on ICON Group International on Amazon and you'll see 472,237 results! Makes VDM's mere 57,000 (well, between yesterday and today they added 659 titles so far) seem wimpy.

The bot idea of 1-star reviews: yes, I mentioned this idea too, in my original article, linked from the original Slashdot submission. Some nerd somewhere, make it so! Amazon can't possibly complain that you're spamming, considering the target.

Why Buy These Books?

[RAMMS EIN]

There is one thing I don't understand, and that is how people get to the point where they actually buy one of these books. Sure, they may turn up in lots of searches, but wouldn't taking a single look at it be enough to determine it is a piece of drivel?

Amazon needs

[mysidia]

A Captcha for new book submission from PoD publishers.

And protection against keyword spamming.

Perhaps Google could give them some pointers?

All web search engines used to be plagued by this crap. I suppose it was only a matter of time before advanced bot technology would be used to taint more traditional media.

by that 'logic', spam is also legal

[Anonymous Coward]

they are simply spamming amazing with tens of thousands of computer generated bullshit books, which are nothing more than copy/pastes of barely related wikipedia articles.

the 'editors' do not even 'edit' the work, its all been done by a computer apparently, including the selection of titles to use.

the whole thing is a misrepresentation and a lie and a scam. its not about 'reselling wikipedia', its about shit product being foisted on unsuspecting consumers.

and the copyright violations wikipedia is full of

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously, there are mass numbers of articles simply copy pasted from other websites. its pathetic.

im tired of people posting who can't read

[Anonymous Coward]

look, this was discussed a few 'pgups' up, someone already wrote just about the exact thing you did, and several other people pointed out why your 'argument' is not even relevant to the issue at hand, nobody and i mean nobody has complained about the CC license. please find me this mythical wikipedia author who thinks they 'own' what they wrote there. because they dont exist. we are all bitching about the fact that VDM is spamming Amazon, selling 'non books' that are random collections of computer selected shit, articles that are barely related to each other, etc. its fraud, its a scam. its a lie. we might be 'enhanced' upset because some of us wrote these articles, but that doesnt make our reason for being upset wrong. we arent mad about copying and reuse. we are mad about fraud. (and besides , technically we do have 'moral use' rights)

i think its great you want to tell us a charming story about some asshole you met on the internet, but seriously. it has nothing to do with this article or the topic.

Re:This might actually be a pretty good developmen

[crossmr]

Not really. This kind of stuff is categorized on wikipedia making it pretty easy to find related articles, especially for well known topics like castles or diseases. If it was a mass amount of articles use something like mechanical turk (from amazon) to cheaply and quickly whittle it down.

VDM Publishing has nothing on Philip M. Parker

[RecoveringOptimist]

VDM Publishing has nothing on Philip M. Parker, who has been doing something similar for years on Amazon with publicly available studies and reports. Go to Amazon, select books, and type in Philip M. Parker in the Amazon search bar. You’ll see that he has over 107,182 “books” for sale on Amazon, the vast majority of which are little more than on-demand reprints of publicly available data (much of which is accessible on the web for free). In many cases there are hundreds of such “books” for sale by Philip M. Parker in which the only difference between them is the title and a short introduction. A reviewer who purchased one such book wrote in Amazon, “This book is nothing but a glorified dump from someone’s internet search.” And, yet, hundreds of thousands of such “books” are available on Amazon, many of which are no doubt purchased by unsuspecting customers.

Now try this: With the same Philip M. Parker book search in Amazon, use the “sort by” feature and sort by price, high to low. Sitting at the top of the heap is “The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Grapes,” for $795. Indeed, it turns out there are thousands of $795 “books” for sale on Amazon by Philip M. Parker.

There is a lot of sleaze lurking just below the surface at Amazon, mostly from its Marketplace Sellers. Unfortunately, as long is it helps rather than hurts Amazon’s bottom line, Amazon seems quite content to let sleazy sellers ply their wares. Take, for example, the Amazon Marketplace seller Mysilverfox. When new DVDs come out, Mysilverfox typically lists them for sale in all three categories: new, used, and collectable. And for the "collectable" DVD, Mysilverfox typically charges 2x, 3x, or more over the list price of the DVD. Now, I wonder how many naive people buy the “collectable” DVD? I suspect the number is much higher than one might intuitively think.

I have more, but this is starting to turn into a rant, so I’ll sign off now.

Example

[Multichill]

See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alphascript_Publishing_book_by_Miller_FP_Vandome_AF_McBrewster_J._A_scanned_example._History_of_Ghana._Copy_and_paste_from_wikipedia.pdf

Compare to PediaPress

[tepples]

Say you take a list of articles related to a WikiProject, weighted by the quality and importance as assessed by project members, and you combine them into a book and have it printed through PediaPress. Are VDM's offerings significantly more expensive than those of PediaPress?

Re:Compare to PediaPress

[balloonpup]

Well, one on 3D rendering from PediaPress is $20.48 for ~412 pages.

One from VDM on a similar topic is $72.00 for ~100 pages. ( http://www.amazon.com/Selective-Rendering-3D-Maps-High-Fidelity/dp/3639216385/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270392883&sr=8-1 )

Search in French university libraries catalogue

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried to find some of these books in the French catalogue of University libraries... They sold at least three of their books, seemingly to the ESSEC (a good reputation business school).

http://www.sudoc.abes.fr/DB=2.1/SET=4/TTL=1/CMD?ACT=SRCHA&IKT=1004&SRT=RLV&TRM=Frederic+P.+Miller

Not enough to make a fortune, but I would be greatly interested to see similar search results in other countries.

Most Annoying Part...

[ponraul]

Every single suggested product that Amazon has emailed me about for the past four months has been one of these books.

I just checked my email and found that "TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library: Open Source, Virtual Appliance, Ubuntu (Operating System), Virtual Machine, Cloud Computing, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud" is now on sale.

I don't really care that these books are on Amazon. What I do care about is Amazon emailing me that these books are now available on Amazon.

A glimpse of the future?

[LihTox]

While I would probably call this particular example fraud, because their Amazon listings apparently do not explain the source of their material, the general principle of repackaging online "open-source" content in hardcover form is legitimate (if it satisfies the appropriate licenses). What intrigues me is the fact that these books are being automatically generated. As artificial intelligence gets better, we're going to start having computers which can generate music, poetry, and maybe even novels or movies which have some commercial value, and they might be able to spit out thousands of works a year, swamping the output of any human artists, and online stores like Amazon or iTunes will have to figure out how to deal with that.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Non-online Bookshops

[zlel]

There's nothing wrong with Wikipedia, or reproducing articles to look like a book and sell it for the price of a book. IMHO the problem lies in online bookstores that make such books look like they're worth buying. Publishers naturally publish books that they think they can make a profit out of. That pushes them to choose good authors. But if online bookstores can make crap profitable, it makes good business sense to publish crap. Online bookshops need to find their own system of check-and-balance.

pillaged the spirit of Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

They have diverged from and pillaged the spirit of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a real-time scholarly community made up of individuals sharing mostly validated (and if not it says so) information for their own interests and desire to share with others. It is Open Access at its best and least complicated. I do not question the validity of the information printed in these books - Wikipedia has been proven over and over to contain as accurate or more accurate information then print encyclopedias. Furthermore, Betascript Publishing is not breaking any copyright laws. I think it is wrong to take that information and sell it.