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:
Signal boosting. But what does the subject line mean?
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.
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