Taking The Books-On-Demand Business Quite Literally
from the now-that's-one-long-tail dept
It would appear that Philip Parker has taken the concept of "the long tail" to heart. He's created a publishing company that has a bunch of computers search the internet and come up with books on various topics in a nearly totally automated fashion. The details aren't at all clear from the article (and I'm surprised there's no discussion at all of potential copyright issues), but it almost sounds like a sort of madlibs -- where someone just need to fill in some blanks, and the computer automates the rest of the book writing process. As a result, Parker reportedly has over 200,000 books published and available on Amazon to date (though, oddly, my own search turned up many fewer), which are all available for "print-on-demand." From the sound of things, you get the feeling that he could take it back one step further to: generate on demand. In the article he provides an example, creating a new "book" in about 13 minutes. That way, a single sale of each book is pure profit. Of course, you might be wise to question the quality of such books. The reviews I found on Amazon of his books are almost universally quite negative.In the meantime, if anyone has more info on Parker or Icon Group, and how it deals with copyright issues, I'd be curious to know more. Parker has a video on YouTube which (by title) suggests he has a patent on this whole process (a quick search turns up this patent on a method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing as the likely patent). The video makes a bunch of claims, but does little to explain how any of this is actually done. Actually, you could say the same thing for the patent itself. It makes a bunch of extremely broad claims, that don't actually do anything to explain how it actually works (which, we had thought, was part of the requirement in getting a patent).
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Filed Under: auto generated books, books on demand, print on demand
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Uh, isn't this called a search engine?
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Re: Uh, isn't this called a search engine?
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Re: Re: Uh, isn't this called a search engine?
It was a dark and stormy night. (dump Google core here). The End
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Yeah, they suck
I think they just crawl Google results, reformat them (badly), and poop out huge numbers of them. Since cost is so low, who cares how many don't sell, as long as some do?
Ya know what it is? It's spam, in inconvenient book form.
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They suck...
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Cook me a book
For example, if I type in penne pasta, green beans, and Gouda cheese, and hit prepare, out shoots a delicious chicken salad sandwich. I'll admit I haven't worked out all the bugs yet.
But until his program (and mine for that matter) makes the perfect primavera, I will not be impressed.
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Re: Cook me a book
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Re: Cook me a book
With all the subprime and house hunting opportunity,
setup one for user to specify their wants, and out
comes the perfect virtual house to live in.
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How to write a book
2) Type topic into Wikipedia
3) Hit print
4) Sell to idiots
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Face, Meet Wall
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Someone kill me puleeze!~
snnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
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Nice that he's taking advantage of parents of children with leukemia
And then it's just spam.
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I think I found a website doing the same thing
http://www.wireless-technology.org/
or maybe don't since they seem to be just trying to generate clicks. But it looks like the articles are all automatically written in this mad libs style and the website generates money through a generous use of Google Ads. It'll be funny when the book people take information from this website, eventually all knowledge will be recycled. Reminds me of the Foundation series by Asimov.
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