Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

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Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby Larry E. Matthews » Jun 14, 2010 8:02 pm

I was doing some online research on Dunbar Cave earlier today when I ran across a link to a book for sale on Amazon.com. The title of the book is: "Caves of Tennessee; Snail Shell Cave, Ruby Falls, Big Bone Cave, Nickajack Cave, Craighead Caverns, Dunbar Cave State Park, Cumberland Caverns".

The listing does not give an author, but says the publisher is "Books LLC". Does anybody have a clue who this is or where they are?

The product details say that the book is Paperback, 48 pages long, was published May 1, 2010, and sells for $19.99.

That is just incredible, to me. Only 48 pages long and yet it costs $19.99. That's 42 cents a page !!! The product dimensions are 9 X 6 X 0.1 inches, so it is a tiny book. Shipping weight is 2.9 ounces. On top of paying $19.99, you have to pay extra for shipping.

Has anybody actually seen this book? Sounds to me like somebody has just gone to basic sources on some of Tennessee's best-known caves and rehashed the basic information on those caves.

I'd love to know who the author is and if he/she has actually been to these caves.

This has got to be one of the stranger listings I have ever seen on Amazon.com. I am really amazed that it is listed.

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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby John Lovaas » Jun 14, 2010 8:11 pm

Hi Larry-

another case of "many suckers, 1440 minutes in the day..."

If you highlight a chunk of text out of the Editorial Review/Product Description and run it through a search engine, you'll see that the text has been copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

So- if the product description is indicative of the content of the book, then the book is a compilation of Wikipedia entries.

Worth every penny of the $19.99. I see there's a used copy for $39- perhaps I should buy that one; maybe the author signed it ;-)
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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby Larry E. Matthews » Jun 14, 2010 8:57 pm

Wow !!! A compilation of Wikipedia listings. Who would have ever thought of such a thing?

Whoever did it must have been too embarassed to put their name on it.

Anbody with a printer could print the same material out for probably 5 cents a page.

Thanks for explaining that to me.

Still...........that's just WIERD !!!

Larry
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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby Scott McCrea » Jun 14, 2010 9:20 pm

A compilation of Wikipedia listings?! Wow, indeed. I've never heard of that. Pretty scummy thing to do.

Wikipedia authors should start putting fake, but plausible, sentences in articles, like cartographers add fictional towns or landmarks to maps to spot a forgery.
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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby John Lovaas » Jun 14, 2010 10:16 pm

Scott McCrea wrote:A compilation of Wikipedia listings?! Wow, indeed. I've never heard of that. Pretty scummy thing to do.


While it isn't "for profit", students are doing all it all the time, from middle school on up to college level. I know several teachers who, when they get a funny feeling about someone's paper, highlight a chunk of text out of the paper and run it through Google. And their hunches usually pan out.

When I was a kid, you had to plagiarize by hand- with a pen, pencil, or typewriter! Kids today have it so easy- Select, Ctrl-c, Click, Ctrl-v, and so on... ;-)
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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby batrotter » Jun 14, 2010 10:36 pm

There was a similar situation back before the Internet and Wikipedia. Numerous caves in Indiana were "published" in guidebooks and sold to newbies. The published data was taken from non-copyrighted and other sources and then put together in a form of a book. These "guidebooks" have been a major problem in the Indiana caving community since then, and continue to be so.
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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby Teresa » Jun 15, 2010 7:37 am

Due to the nature of Wikipedia, it probably isn't copyrighted in the usual sense that even Britannica is, since Wikipedia is am "authorless" compilation itself. It's not illegal to take data from compilations and recompile it yourself. The case ATT phone books made against small startup phone books proved that. :shrug:

Re the digital generation and cut/copy/paste: some teachers are actually encouraging it by a) giving a student overnight or two days to come up with a full-blown report on some topic, and b) not jumping people's cases about lack of attribution. I was part of a college class where we had two days to make a 5-7 minute oral presentation, complete with transparency overheads on an assigned class of extinct animal. There was no paper to write. Nearly everyone in the class just cut/pasted stuff off the Internet, including illustrations. I did, too. (Hey, assignment on Monday, due at the next class on Wednesday, what other option did you have? Certainly not thoughtful research digested and reflected in tranquility.) I put web URL attribution on the cut/pasted illustrations, and was the only person of 24 to do so.
While the instructor publicly commended me, others were not censured.
We're losing, or have lost the concept of "value added" in intellectual exchange. Wikipedia, by the way, does not allow you to cite original research, but their policy says everything has to be from secondary sources. True, that filters the loonies, but it also keeps quality from occurring.
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Re: Strange New Book On Tennessee Caves

Postby LukeM » Jun 15, 2010 8:07 am

Does this look familiar?

http://www.readingbee.com/bookdetail-1153696533-title-The_Brown_Fairy_Book-author-by_Andrew_Lang.html

If you enlarge the image you can see it uses the same font and background. Looks like someone is in the business of re-publishing books and Internet articles that are in the public domain? There are plenty more examples on that site. I wonder why there is no info on the publisher? "Books LLC" seems intentionally vague. I'm thinking that these cover images are just being auto-generated. I'm actually pretty curious to see what a $20 stapled stack of photocopied pages looks like. :doh:
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