2011-06-03

Går det så går det

Looking at Trumpeter’s USS England I decided that a Buckley class destroyer escort would be a nice thing to build to improve my ship modelling skills. References are of course needed for a good build, so I did a search on Amazon and lo and behold, there was even a book specifically on USS England. But…the cover picture? And what does the star “High quality content by Wikipedia articles!” mean?

A search unearthed this investigation by Chris Rand. Apparently what’s going on is that some guys hit on a brilliant idea: Write a script that downloads a Wikipedia article, follows the links to some pre-determined depth, concatenates all the gathered material and calls it a book. Repeat for all articles in Wikipedia. Print on demand and charge an outrageous sum = profit! There are already thousands of “books” under the imprints of Alphascript and Betascript being distributed through Amazon and other web shops to unwary shoppers happy to find a book on the obscure subject they were investigating.

Beware! Beware!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Signal boosting. But what does the subject line mean?

kai said...

Literally it means “If it works, it works.”, as in desperately attempting a slightly unlikely solution to a problem. More specifically it can be used to describe a trick or deception that is successful if the mark is not too observant, such as slipping in a spurious item in a long bill, often with a connotation of amusement at the chutzpah.