Another Crappy Book Copied From Wikipedia

[Larry E. Matthews]

Bob Biddix sent me a link to Amazon.com this morning about a "Book" (and I do use the term loosely) titled: "Snail Shell Cave: Limestone, Rockvale, Tennessee, Cave, Southeastern Cave Convervancy Inc., Murfreesboro, Tennessee. United States, Sedimentary Rock."

They have gone into Wikipedia and copied the information on Snail Shell Cave and every link to Snail Shell Cave. The photo on the Front Cover isn't Snail Shell Cave. God knows where that is. It's an outdoors photo, not a cave photo. And, it isn't anywhere near Snail Shell Cave.

They want $46.00, plus shipping, for this piece of garbage. It is only 88 pages long. You can read all this for FREE on Wikipedia. You could print it out yourself much cheaper, but you would not waste your time.

Does anybody really buy this crap?

It was produced by Betabooks. If you Google Betabooks, they have produced 10,000 books just like this, all copied from Wikipedia. You can imagine the TOTAL lack of quality control.

Larry E. Matthews
NSS #6792-F

[John Lovaas]

At least there's a little truth in advertising, the first sentence of the description reads:

"...High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!..."

I am impressed that someone's figured out a way to aggregate the Wikipedia data into an on-demand print format, and post thousands of such items on Amazon, all while making very little or no money.

Then again, I am impressed at how much garbage can be loaded onto a garbage truck.

90 seconds of Googling gave me their website:

http://www.betascript-publishing.com

based out of Mauritius; a 'subsidiary' of these folks:

http://www.vdm-publishing.com

Pictures of their Christmas party in Mauritius on the News page.

Quite the business model- aggregate Wikipedia content into 'scientific'(!?!) publications, printed on-demand.

Sounds like some investors somewhere(and that somewhere is mentioned at the VDM site) are providing a nice chunk of capital for a whole lot of, well, not much of anything.

[Jeff Bartlett]

I'm going to hold out for the gem titled "XKCD: Randall Munroe, Independent Contractor, Mathematical Joke, Apollonian Gasket, Stick Figure, Popular Culture." Now available in paperback!

[LukeM]

The re-published Wikipedia article market has room for more than one publisher!? The scary part is that many of these "books" are available used.