"Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on ZX Spectrum programmers."
Either Scottie has been on his bull**** generator again or the publishers seem to think "curate" is good, "copy n paste" is bad.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's about ZX Spectrum programmers. :-)
More specifically, what they've probably done is:
1) find a category on Wikipedia
2) grab all pages in that category
3) shove them all together and put it for sale on Amazon as a print-on-demand book (entirely legally)
4) repeat x10000
5) wait for some academic with an enormous research grant to order in fifty books relating to their area of study without looking too closely at what they're buying
6) profit
It seems that Amazon are lending their name to this scam.
Reminds me of when Burke's Peerage lent their name to books of Your Family Tree. Everyone got an invitation including my Mum who received a list of names and addresses from digital phone books.
I'm still curious about the whole "7 new from ?6.22, 2 used from ?13.64" business on Amazon though, since in all likelihood none of these books actually physically exist yet. I know it's all a sham powered by automatic bots bidding against each other (and occasionally going a bit haywire and getting into a feedback loop that pushes the prices up to millions of dollars for a single book), and pretending to have stock when actually they just buy the books in from the source when an order comes in - but how do they end up with prices that are cheaper than the original? (Unless the sellers are really all the same guy - in which case, *why*?)
so I dread to think what nonsense is in the Spectrum book. Someone has written a script, slurped Wiki entries and applied a word Template to the output
then posted em all on Amazon. Madness!
It's a scam to gain money via print-on-demand services.
Many retailers, including on-line dealers like Amazon themselves, will order at least one copy of each published book to prove it can be obtained, and so they have to pay the printer for it. Then the printer makes a little money and whoever is running the bot script that set it up gets some cash too. And anyone daft enough to actually order it contributes too.
If you search on Barnes & Noble, it's full of these.
Why Amazon and the like allow it to continue I don't know, as anyone who orders one is going to be a seriously disatisfied customer. And if they are pre-ordering stock of it that they then can't shift they're idiots to keep falling for it, though they're probably just using bot scripts for inventory control too.
It's a scam to gain money via print-on-demand services.
Many retailers, including on-line dealers like Amazon themselves, will order at least one copy of each published book to prove it can be obtained, and so they have to pay the printer for it. Then the printer makes a little money and whoever is running the bot script that set it up gets some cash too. And anyone daft enough to actually order it contributes too.
If you search on Barnes & Noble, it's full of these.
Why Amazon and the like allow it to continue I don't know, as anyone who orders one is going to be a seriously disatisfied customer. And if they are pre-ordering stock of it that they then can't shift they're idiots to keep falling for it, though they're probably just using bot scripts for inventory control too.
Ahh that makes sense. I do have 1 question that's bugging me - what does "Foxton Locks Mix" mean?
I thought we cleared that one up a while ago. It's a reference to the 'Thalbert Dock Mix' version of Hysteria, as there are a couple of different versions of it, and there's nothing like 'The Albert Dock' where I grew up in leafy Northamptonshire. The chain of locks near Foxton, Leicestershire, on the Grand Union Canal was probably the closest navigable feature of note that sounds a bit silly.
Though now I leave within walking distance of the Zebon Copse Swing Bridge on the Basingstoke canal. Not quite so impresive, but just as much fun to operate.
Hephaestus Books sound like the same sort of outfit as LLC Books... about a year back I found all manner of ****ty ZX-related Wikipedia-culled unbooks from these clowns and followed it up with Amazon on the grounds that it might be some manner of spam. I eventually got a message back saying these books were legitimately listed and couldn't be pulled. It really undermines the integrity of the online book selling industry that this clag is allowed page space. On the other hand maybe Wikipedia is to "blame" with their liberal republishing regulations.
Hephaestus Books sound like the same sort of outfit as LLC Books... about a year back I found all manner of ****ty ZX-related Wikipedia-culled unbooks from these clowns and followed it up with Amazon on the grounds that it might be some manner of spam. I eventually got a message back saying these books were legitimately listed and couldn't be pulled. It really undermines the integrity of the online book selling industry that this clag is allowed page space. On the other hand maybe Wikipedia is to "blame" with their liberal republishing regulations.
that kinda shows that amazon doesn't really care about its customers, as long as it gets paid.
they dont seem to realise, if they make a big deal of purging this sort of crap from their lists, they will make people respect them more, and eventually bring in more revenue
Comments
It could have been written by you and me.
"Collated from various sources including Wikipedia"
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spectrum-Programmers-Including-Jangeborg-Programmer/dp/1242968393/
"Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on ZX Spectrum programmers."
Either Scottie has been on his bull**** generator again or the publishers seem to think "curate" is good, "copy n paste" is bad.
It's a whole new (copy n paste) paradigm!
More specifically, what they've probably done is:
1) find a category on Wikipedia
2) grab all pages in that category
3) shove them all together and put it for sale on Amazon as a print-on-demand book (entirely legally)
4) repeat x10000
5) wait for some academic with an enormous research grant to order in fifty books relating to their area of study without looking too closely at what they're buying
6) profit
*clicks through to their publisher page*... ah yes, there you go.
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=2186
It seems that Amazon are lending their name to this scam.
Reminds me of when Burke's Peerage lent their name to books of Your Family Tree. Everyone got an invitation including my Mum who received a list of names and addresses from digital phone books.
Where are Burke's Peerage now?
I see they're using Media Player's visualizations for the book covers :-)
on the up-side though, people are gonna get sick of it, and start using book shops again.
it really is pointeless trying to browse for books on there.
e.g: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cool-Jazz-Saxophonists-Including-Mulligan/dp/1242501959/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328278135&sr=1-10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Desmond
so I dread to think what nonsense is in the Spectrum book. Someone has written a script, slurped Wiki entries and applied a word Template to the output
then posted em all on Amazon. Madness!
Many retailers, including on-line dealers like Amazon themselves, will order at least one copy of each published book to prove it can be obtained, and so they have to pay the printer for it. Then the printer makes a little money and whoever is running the bot script that set it up gets some cash too. And anyone daft enough to actually order it contributes too.
If you search on Barnes & Noble, it's full of these.
Why Amazon and the like allow it to continue I don't know, as anyone who orders one is going to be a seriously disatisfied customer. And if they are pre-ordering stock of it that they then can't shift they're idiots to keep falling for it, though they're probably just using bot scripts for inventory control too.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Ahh that makes sense. I do have 1 question that's bugging me - what does "Foxton Locks Mix" mean?
Though now I leave within walking distance of the Zebon Copse Swing Bridge on the Basingstoke canal. Not quite so impresive, but just as much fun to operate.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
I'd guess more or less the same nonsense that's in the spectrum wikipedia articles ;)
that kinda shows that amazon doesn't really care about its customers, as long as it gets paid.
they dont seem to realise, if they make a big deal of purging this sort of crap from their lists, they will make people respect them more, and eventually bring in more revenue