Wikipedia book

[Icehaven]

One of the books I ordered for work has just arrived and it's literally a few Wikipedia articles printed out. Notes and references make up about half the pages (of which there's only about 70 anyway). It's supposed to be a history of Mumbai, so it's the Wikipedia entries for 'History of Mumbai', 'Mumbai' and 'India'. £9.99. I order hundreds of books every year and have never seen anything like this before, it's absolutely shameless. I've got in touch with our processing department to see if we can return it and I'm tempted to contact our suppliers to see if they're aware, and if so why the fuck are they selling them? I vaguely remember reading about something like this in Private Eye many years ago but I thought that was just through Amazon and I'm extremely surprised it's still happening. It's Bookvika publishing and LENNEX Corp. apparently so beware!

[buttgammon]

I've often seen things like this on Google Books and the like - they look like they're more or less a scam. I've ordered some terrible print on demand copies of out-of-copyright books before but never anything like this, thankfully.

[imitationleather]

As I say whenever I hear of a scam: Wish I'd thought of doing that.

[Midas]

I remember Wikipedia used to offer an online service where you could create custom print-on-demand books containing articles of your choice. Always wondered if anyone actually bothered with it!

EDIT: In fact, it looks like they still do it. I suspect it's not illegal to sell copies but it's a bit dubious.

[touchingcloth]

I'll do you the history of Bombay for £9.59.

[buttgammon]

Presumably, there's so little human input in these things that they will contain all of the errors, vandalism and [citation needed]s of an actual Wiki page.

[Johnny Foreigner]

I buy lots of centuries-old works via print-on-demand services, whose quality is inevitably highly unpredictable. The most annoying mistake, when a book has been mindlessly scanned via OCR, is that the old letter s is rendered as an f.



I have had mixed experiences with Forgotten Books. They sometimes make an effort to check whether their output is in any way legible, although they, too, did once copy an author's 'biography' from Wikipedia. It was a completely different person, who would have written the book several years after his death. Utter stupidity.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I bought one of these when I worked in a library too. Fucking embarrassing, just hid it on my shelf until I left.

[Inspector Norse]

Presumably, there's so little human input in these things that they will contain all of the errors, vandalism and [citation needed]s of an actual Wiki page.

I once set an assignment for a grade 6 (11-12 years old) class to write about different English-speaking countries. One of them turned in a piece on Ireland that was obviously lifted from Wikipedia, right down to having the [citation needed] after some lines.

What made it particularly noteworthy was that she'd written it out by hand.

[buttgammon]

I once set an assignment for a grade 6 (11-12 years old) class to write about different English-speaking countries. One of them turned in a piece on Ireland that was obviously lifted from Wikipedia, right down to having the [citation needed] after some lines.

What made it particularly noteworthy was that she'd written it out by hand.

Haha! That's such a laborious form of copy and pasting.

[dissolute ocelot]

For a while a few years ago if you searched for anything on Amazon you'd get lots of weirdly specific books like Rock Singers Who Died By Suicide or Musicians from Bradford. All just taken from Wikipedia categories and assembled into print-on-demand books. I guess Amazon tweaked their algorithms and the bottom fell out of that market.

[Thomas]

I buy lots of centuries-old works via print-on-demand services, whose quality is inevitably highly unpredictable. The most annoying mistake, when a book has been mindlessly scanned via OCR, is that the old letter s is rendered as an f.



I have had mixed experiences with Forgotten Books.

Sorry to be that guy, but it's actually Sorgotten Books.

[JesusAndYourBush]

For a while a few years ago if you searched for anything on Amazon you'd get lots of weirdly specific books like Rock Singers Who Died By Suicide or Musicians from Bradford. All just taken from Wikipedia categories and assembled into print-on-demand books. I guess Amazon tweaked their algorithms and the bottom fell out of that market.

Yes, I remember seeing loads of 'books' on Amazon that were obviously nicked from Wikipedia.  I'm assuming the books didn't actually exist but were printed to order if anyone bought one.  Some of them had a really low page count, like 12 pages.

[steveh]

Lightning Source / Ingrams who run one of the biggest print on demand operations and also handle Amazon's service in several countries have gradually tightened up on poor quality books and those that are just reproducing content from the net. Returns to on demand printers also usually get shredded and recycled and the publisher will lose the associated revenue which makes me wonder how profitable it is to do books like this when so many must go back.

[Mobbd]

I've got in touch with our processing department to see if we can return it and I'm tempted to contact our suppliers to see if they're aware, and if so why the fuck are they selling them?

Did you have any luck?

I ordered a very shitty book earlier in the year called Scotland 2070, which promised to be a dispassionate look at the possibilities for a future independent Scotland (it was mentioned favourably in a Guardian opinion piece but it was not an actual book review). It was so, so shitty. It had clearly been rejected (or probaby just ghosted) by real publishers and this was a print-on-demand affair though it seemed to be from a small academic press rather than self-published. It hadn't been typeset at all (it just looked like a Word document) and I sincerely doubt it had been professionally edited. It had been written by academics from a small university or college somewhere but I don't know what they thought academic writing should look like or even what a book should look like. Amusingly, a very shitty foreword with an oddly promotional tone ("this book is very well researched, check it out!" even though it wasn't and I'd already bought it) was signed off by someone I'd never heard of, nor was it explained who he was. It basically just said "So-and-so Mc-something, a Scottish man". The book had an oddly nice cover design, which is part of what sucked me in (it had a sort of cottagecore Scandi look, which made think optimistic semi-utopian thoughts).

Anyway, the point of this ramble is that I vowed to send it back to the publisher come hell or high water. I sent it back (at a small cost) to Blackwell's exaplaining that it wasn't a real book and they shouldn't be selling it. After a few weeks (I imagine they had to deal with the publisher) they eventually gave me a refund. I just wanted the publisher to know that this isn't on! Like the book trade doesn't have enough problems.

[Icehaven]

Did you have any luck?

I spoke to our Bibliographic services people and they said it had happened before and we'd be unlikely to get a refund. Pretty annoying really so I might still contact our suppliers (Askews and Holts - supposed to be a specialised library supplier!) and ask them why they aren't more careful but they're a bit crap at the best of times so I won't expect much.

[fucking ponderous]

At a Barnes and Noble (large US bookstore chain) among the "Performing Arts" books a few years ago I found one of these printed from Wikipedia books, about Willem Dafoe. He was on the cover, the book was very thick, and it consisted of his Wiki article and the Wiki articles for all the movies he had been in. This is the only time I've ever seen one of these in real life and I don't know how it got there. This is a chain with a pretty surface level inventory of books, an inventory that I assume doesn't change much from store to store. My best guess is someone ordered it to the store and never picked it up? At any rate it was gone on my next visit.