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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."
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.
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
My work here is dung.
Made me think of venereal disease...
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.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
and I suppose they should put warnings on all of their movies that they are recycled Shakespearean plays?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
> 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.
1) Vandalize the wikipedia article about yourself
2) Order the print-on-demand book
3) Sue VDM for libel
4? Profit!
Does this mean Wikipedia articles can now cite themselves in book form as authoritative sources? Super-holy-shit-vicious-circle Batman!
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
In French, VDM stands for "Vie De Merde", which means "Shitty Life". Appropriate
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?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
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)
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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...
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
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein