
Patented Book Writing System Creates, Sells Hundreds Of Thousands Of Books - jamesbritt
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/
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jkn
This reminds me of a post by an author who had his own book's prize on Amazon
decreased in a bidding war between bots [1]. It's a different matter but the
post begins with this:

 _Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book,
“Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by
a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold
online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for
this kind of thing. A story about computer science and other improbable
things._

 _It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon
Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars
no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic
absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about
computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to
have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less
printed and read._

[1] <http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/02/bots-seized-control.html>

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revelation
Amazon needs to clamp down on this nonsense, seeing how it has already
infested the Kindle store, where you can find thousands of either
automatically generated books or books consisting entirely of public domain
content from Project Gutenberg or books mixed together from Wikipedia content
(where they violate the license).

Ironically the only thing not automatically generated in Parkers books is the
description (and probably a bunch of fake reviews). Very much into the scam
territory here.

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belorn
Aren't this the same books that commonly breaks the license requirement of
Wikipedia?

In particularly the kindle versions, if they take data from Wikipedia, then
the book need to be licensed under CC-ShareAlike license and users could re-
distribute copies freely. If not, then the company behind the book is
basically doing copyright infringement, in large scale, and for profit.

For copying texts from public domain, I find that the written language evolve
faster than copyright expires. For example, the Swedish written language has
changed so much in the last 100 years that middle aged adults can not
understand 80% of the words written in many books which are still under
copyright.

~~~
konstruktor
And at least you can return a physical book to the seller when you find out it
is auto-generated rubbish. Is this possible on kindle?

~~~
belorn
The return policy of amazon is seven days of the date of purchase in regard to
books on the kindle.

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rurounijones
How well are the sources curated? One of the sample books is a medical text to
be used by doctors etc. I would hate to see parts of that book sourced from
unreliable places.

Seeing as this thing can apparently put together books on new topics on the
fly I am highly doubtful of the quality.

~~~
benesch
Some of these books are absolutely ridiculous. I can't imagine there's a
market for "Finished Weft Knit Fabrics Made of Broad Fabrics Measuring at
Least 12 Inches Wide That Have Been Knit and Finished in the Same
Establishment Excluding Hosiery: World Market Segmentation by City."

I have a feeling the Amazon reviews for his books may be particularly
unrepresentative of their quality—something strikes me as sarcastic about most
of the reviews... [1]

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/Report-Finished-Fabrics-Measuring-
Hosi...](http://www.amazon.com/Report-Finished-Fabrics-Measuring-
Hosiery/dp/0497731908/ref=sr_1_30?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355472210&sr=1-30)

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/2007-2012-Building-Excluding-
Cafeteria...](http://www.amazon.com/2007-2012-Building-Excluding-Cafeteria-
Restaurant/product-
reviews/0497503093/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending)

~~~
DanBC
The title you give feels a bit like a parody of the old soviet regime's 5 year
plans.

About the reviews: Now he's sorted out book creation he can work on review
creation. Disturbingly, there may be more money in that (from shady
characters) than in book creation.

~~~
Vivtek
The difference being that Amazon may tolerate book spam, but it comes down
hard on review spam.

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cduan
Here's the patent (7,266,767):

<http://www.google.com/patents?id=bHeBAAAAEBAJ>

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cskau
Interesting. I just publish my first work myself, slightly along the lines of
this, though obviously nowhere near the scale.

I basically just took a freely available dictionary data source and compiled
it into a nicely readable, Kindle-compatible format. I put it up on Amazon
through their KDP and almost instantly had sales, which was a cool experience.

The whole thing got me thinking of some of the large number of other
opportunities of throwing a little code at compiling data into useful volumes
for for instance the Kindle.

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curiousdannii
Anyone got sales data on these books? Just because they're for sale doesn't
mean anyone is buying them.

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JacobAldridge
The first time I heard about the 'long tail' was at a business conference in
2008 (09?), and this was used as an example.

It did a wonderful job of breaking through the assumptions of many in
attendance - people who were tuning out because "my industry is too complex"
or "we're too creative for this to apply" suddenly realised that if books
could profitably br automated and printed on demand, then there were
opportunities for them if they wanted to consider them.

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ck2
This seems very close to the technique that seo content spammers use.

His data sources are free and don't cost him anything? Otherwise 20 cents per
book is wrong.

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otakucode
I will resist the kneejerk 'oh you can't automate that because humans are
special snowflakes' aspect that I'm sure will be well covered by others.

What concerns me about this is factual accuracy. It seems to me that these
books, while they may compile information, would have to be incapable of doing
anything but, at best, providing the consensus about a certain topic. This
type of system could also most likely be used to easily manufacture consensus
which might be even more worrisome.

I'd bet $100 that he could set this system on any psychology/sociology topic
and it would be hailed as an innovator.

~~~
psionski
I don't think others will cover said aspect. We actually like computers more
than we like humans here.

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rayiner
both Google and Amazon need to clamp down on these sorts of things. A few
short years ago, if I was considering a new product XYZ, I used to be able to
type "XYZ Review" into Google and quickly get a pretty comprehensive list of
reviews on the topic. Now, I get page after page of auto-generated fake
reviews, that source some specifications from the product page and throw in
meaningless accompanying text. It has absolutely destroyed the utility of
Google for that particular use.

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VSerge
Patenting an algorithm, ie a logical machine built solely on maths, is pretty
much like patenting a natural law of physics. Not to mention the workflows in
the patent are obvious statement, after obvious statement, after obvious
statement. This is absurd beyond description, and of course doesn't help
innovation one bit. Kudos to the patent examiners for their deep analytical
skills.

On a side note, the cost of a book being described as being electricity and
hardware, it has only two logical conclusions: \- open source licences are
getting abused as pointed out by belorn \- authors are getting their contents
used and sold as if the "author" was that system

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alexpopescu
Is this the awesome & absolutely cr*p generator?

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lifeguard
Crowd-sourced prior art will easily invalidate this patent. Cool idea though.
Wikipedia books are also excellent and machine generated.

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madiator
People seem to have bought a few books and given reviews:
[http://www.amazon.com/Websters-Icelandic-English-
Thesaurus-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Websters-Icelandic-English-Thesaurus-
Dictionary/product-
reviews/0497835185/ref=sr_1_12_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1)

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PLejeck
I think the part that shocked me most was "The 2007-2012 World Outlook for
Wood Toilet Seats for $795"

~~~
drone
It would probably be less shocking if you were thinking of expanding your
toilet seat factory, and you needed a reference for the financial projections
you were proposing to the bank in support of an expansion loan.

I've, more than once, spent several hundred dollars on "reports" from "well-
established analyst firms," that happened to be the only source of up-to-date,
relevant data. Most of those, upon receipt, could have easily been
automatically generated from the dataset, and the value of the human was
difficult to ascertain.

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barkingcat
SKYNET begins collecting information that it will use to become self-conscious
during the formative years of intelligent writing computers (2011-2012)

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chris_wot
SKYNET finds collections of books written by automatons and thus the data
becomes corrupted.

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Tichy
What kind of reviews do his books get?

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logn
Auto-generated ones, I presume?

