The odd tale of Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing
This is one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen on the internet. A company variously calling itself Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing is taking articles from Wikipedia and publishing them as books. It would appear that the act of doing that is legal, but from the outside, many of the books give the appearance of having been put together by computer or something, because the titles (and presumably contents) tend to be a Wikipedia page forming the starting point for the book and then a load of other Wikipedia pages which are linked-to from that page. It’s all very strange.
For example, the book above is rather oddly called (deep breath) Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit. Now, Vreni Schneider is a Swiss skier, and if you visit the Wikipedia page about her you’ll see those other items in the book’s title are all Wikipedia pages linked-to from there. So presumably the subjects have some connection. Well… yes. But not necessarily one which forms a particularly logical grouping. Schneider is namechecked in a song by popular beat combo Half Man Half Biscuit called Uffington Wassail, a fact which somebody has deemed worthy of adding to her Wikipedia page. So now Half Man Half Biscuit, a cult musical act from Birkenhead, get featured in a book which appears to be mainly about skiing. Presumably their Wikipedia page is also reproduced in the book.
This is a massive operation. One thing the books have in common is the rather odd label “High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles”. If you Google that phrase you find thousands upon thousands of these books, many of them with their own websites. These are mainly WordPress blogs which look like they’ve been assembled by some automated program.
I wondered if perhaps it was all a clever ruse, and these books didn’t exist, but their websites made money. However, blow me down, Amazon is selling them, listing huge numbers of the things (and that presumably means they have them in the warehouse). And they’re not cheap. The Vreni Schneider book at Amazon is twenty-five quid, for example.
What’s going on here? What are these collections of Wikipedia articles which in many cases (like the one above) might seem linked if you’re a computer, but are clearly unrelated as far as humans are concerned? I’m far from the first person to stumble on this operation. There’s even a Wikipedia page about it, which might be ironic if they make that into a book. Alphascript Publishing has a website, and on it they quote from an interview with The Guardian about themselves, although I can’t find that on The Guardian website.
It’s an extraordinary thing. Most bloggers and forum posters writing about this company seem to be up in arms about the fact that it’s republishing articles from Wikipedia for profit. But I think the real story is how they can physically print and make a profit from such obscure titles, even with the content coming for free. How many copies of a book do you have to sell at those prices to make a profit? Presumably not nearly as many as I thought. I wonder if they sell many through their thousands of websites? Or if the key to the whole enterprise is somehow getting stocked by Amazon?
I would love to hear Amazon’s justification for selling this stuff. The forums and comments suggest they’re creating a lot of very pissed-off customers.
UPDATE August 2010: The books are being “retired” – see comment from Wolfy below.
You have a few assumptions that I believe are mistaken. Clear those up, and the rest of this comes into focus.
From what I understand, Amazon does not stock every book in their catalog. I don’t know how many titles they physically stock at any time, but for smaller companies they list the book, and then request them from the publisher (or maybe an intermediary wholesaler). So, Amazon isn’t stocking these books, but is listing them.
These days, you don’t need to publish a book to publish a book. Print on demand services will take submissions from anyone, and only produce copies specifically asked for/bought. The better services like Lulu compile catalogs of their available titles, and, as I recall, for a modest fee, will include your book in the main-line publisher’s catalog used by much of the book industry… including Amazon.
So: there’s how they’re published, and there’s how they’re showing up on Amazon. For producing them, it’s pretty obvious you’re on the right track. Some one(s) produced a script that ingested the total contents of Wikipedia, determined ‘clusters’ of data based off of article links (probably just the first six to show up in the ‘core’ article at a guess), and then did some automatic formatting to turn it into a publishable PDF.
How many books to turn this automated dreck into a profitable venture? Depends on the catalog listing fees, which I recall are pretty minimal (and maybe he got a volume discount?), though that’s the part I’m fuzziest on at the moment. So, sadly, not many at all (discounting the sweat equity of writing the scripting code and such in the first place).
Thanks for that, Rindis. I always assumed that the Amazon label “In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com” meant they had it in the warehouse, although from what you say, I was obviously being naive.
I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. :)
I hadn’t looked closely enough to note or think of the ‘In Stock’ tag, which is indeed defined by Amazon as: “In Stock: The item is on hand in at least one fulfillment center, and we expect to be able to prepare this item for shipment within a few hours to a few days (depending on the shipping option you choose).”
So, maybe they do have copies of all these books to hand. Though from what (very) little I understand of Amazon policy, I wouldn’t expect it. (Would you stock hundreds/thousands of books by a new publishing house with no previous credentials?) So: a) Amazon has ordered (say) 1 each of a bunch of no-name publisher books on the off-chance that someone will buy them; b) their inventory system marked them all as ‘In Stock’ erroneously; c) they have a deal with one of the bigger PoD services to allow them to produce books from them ‘in house’ or ‘on site’, which wouldn’t *technically* be “in stock”, but the difference would be down to semantics (since they’d be able to produce a copy upon demand).
I like the idea of c, but I’m just guessing. There’s also other possibilities, but those seem the most likely/obvious to me.
And as a final note, I see that these books *do* have ISBNs, you can get them in bulk (lots of 10 and 100 are what I usually hear about, but there are bigger lots you can buy), so it certainly cost these people (person? – I’m not convinced that we’ve got more than one person in this business) *something*.
Sigh. And looking again, I see that the books all have three people listed as editors (cursory looks says the same three on each book). Which means it’s a three-person company at least. Despite any other failings, I doubt they’re lying about that part. Though ‘editor’ seems a little strong for the amount of review these books seem to have gone through.
And with 10,000 titles (bizarre as they are) to their credit, these three editors are presumably the most widely published “authors” of all time!
I like the idea of having software that can automatically take a website and prepare it for print publication. There are some web sites with hundreds of pages of invaluable information. I’d be happy to pay a company a reasonable amount to have a print on demand hard copy for my permanent collection. Is that service available anywhere?
There is a project to makebooks available free, and General Books LLC is printing books from this and selling them, although most can be obtained free by PDF download, or by use of other formats. Surprise surprise, Amazon is selling this publisher’s books. I made the mistake of getting one, and I did get a full refund. I asked them to remove the book, but they asked me to provide copyright infringement details. As I’m not the author and the copyright has lapsed in most cases, that route to get it removed was dead in the water.
I do think there are many so called scammers out there, but like you said above, the costs of production is probably what I paid for. The thing is, they reproduced an OCR copy of a book with Chinese characters, and it came out like garbled mess of random monkey typing practice. What’s more, they omitted all the front matter which indicated that the book was scanned as OCR text and the university’s notice about copyright as well where the book was originally scanned into PDF format. Here is the book in the Internet Archive – look down the left, and you’ll see Full Text.
[...] to grab (possibly) related Wikipedia pages, print them out, and put them in a book. More about this here. I don’t know who would buy such books, but I guess you need just 100 customers to net you [...]
There are (at least) three imprints – Alphascript, Betascript, and Fastbook – all under the control of VDM Publishing. Fastbook does German versions, I haven’t figured out the difference between Alpha and Beta. Look up “VDM Publishing” on Wikipedia; the Discussion page is particularly interesting. I wrote complaining to Amazon, their lame reply is “As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.” No one in their right mind wants to discover a way to spend money to obtain free information.
A rough estimate is that VDM Publishing is adding about a book every two minutes to Amazon. They’re up to 54,000 books (at least) listed right now for Alphascript + Betascript, and Alphascript alone added 20k volumes from some time in February to April 2. Crazy.
[...] at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as ‘Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter [...]
[...] und Betascript Publishing arbeiten mit System. In den Staaten regt sich unter Bloggern großer Unmut, nicht zuletzt, da Amazon selbst offenbar Gefallen an dem Geschäftsmodell finden. [...]
[...] und Betascript Publishing arbeiten mit System. In den Staaten regt sich unter Bloggern großer Unmut, nicht zuletzt, da Amazon selbst offenbar Gefallen an dem Geschäftsmodell findet. [...]
The Amazon “product description” paragraph for at least one of these “books” incoherently reproduces a few sentences from the wikipedia articles. Even the marketing is computer-generated!
Wow.. I just stumbled across this myself.. Glad I’m not the only one noticing it.
I work in publishing. Amazon does not, in fact, stock at least one copy of EVERYTHING it calls “in stock.” Because Amazon has its own massive print on demand operation, it can (with permission of the publisher) list a book as “in stock” and then just make the books whenever an order comes in. They can make books in 24-48 hours.
[...] for Alphascript Publishers the situation cleared up. There are Yahoo Answers, forum emails, and blog posts inquiring about or investigating this publisher, and the consensus is that the publisher assembles [...]
I had heard about this “scam” months ago, after coming across some of the titles on Amazon. However, imagine my surprise when one of the books turned up in our cataloguing department, in an Australian university library! (We paid $60 for the title after an academic requested it, unaware of its origins).
I did a quick check, and found it was the first title we had purchased, but noted almost 25 other titles from these “publishers” had found their way into other Australian academic libraries. I note 11 titles on the UK Copac website. I would be interested to know the true extent of the holdings of these “books” around the world, and just how many libraries and other customers have been decieved.
We spend tens of thousands of dollars with Amazon each year (as does any academic library), so quite why they feel the need to partner with such dubious practices is beyond me. I have now informed my collegues to watch out for any future variations and to be vigilant. Hopefully, if enough people keep spreading the word, and complaining to Amazon, the practice will end.
Well, the books ARE printed by Amazon, so they can’t argue that they did not know what the publisher did. One thing that confuses, me though; amazon does not say ‘in stock’ but that it has a certain number in stock, such as 7 or eight. Does that mean that it is physically in stock, or is that just creative marketing?
[...] The publisher of the book, Alphascript Publishing, “anually publish more than 10,000 new titles and are thus one of the leading publishing houses of academic research. We specialize in publishing copyleft projects”. So they scrape Wikipedia for content and at the moment they offer almost 40,000 books at Amazon, priced at something like 40 to 80 US Dollars. All the books that I have seen are edited by the same three persons. There are books about blogs and bazookas, eyes and aztecs, the high court of Australia, Lufthansa and intestines, and so on. They also have three other books that mention chiptune. This is probably the most well-published and well-educated editors in the world, as a commenter hinted here. [...]
I recently sent a complaint to Amazon regarding getting recommended books by Alphascript Publishing. I’ve just received this today:
Greetings from Amazon.co.uk
Further to your e-mail on July 20, 2010 with regard to the recommendations of books by Alphascript publishing.
I would like to inform that, all Alphascript Wikipedia titles were retired and removed from Createspace.
This item is still available because Amazon has inventory for this particular ASIN. Please note that we are working with the concerned department to determine how much inventory we currently have on hand to determine the scope of the issue.
Rest assured that, we are aware of this issue and working to prevent it occurring.
I would suggest that the Angry Librarian tracks down the originator of the orders for those 25 Alphascript books.
It is theoretically possible – and I do not for a moment entertain the unworthy thought that upright citizens like Alphascript would do such a terrible thing – that a script to generate book titles and book-content keywords might exploit a weakness in Internet Explorer’s cookie security to interrogate a regular Amazon user’s search and purchase profile. Amazon’s own ‘readers who bought this book also purchased…’ script would then present the user with a wealth of ‘related’ material and generate a few hundred sales a year.
On a less sinister note: if (say) 1 in 100,000 clicks on the ‘buy’ button are mistakes – and that’s an absurdly low error rate for a mouse-click operation – then a less targeted approach will still lead to a few hundred sales a year when inattentive users inadvertently purchase a book when they had merely intended to glance at it on Amazon’s website.
I am certain that it is technically impossible to insert bogus purchases into a high-spending Amazon user’s order stream, and I doubt that anyone would be stupid enough to try: Amazon’s security is excellent, the risk of discovery is very high, and it wouldn’t be economically-viable for an individual user. But a large company or academic library placing thousands of Amazon orders a year on a centralised purchasing account would be an attractive target, and I doubt that these external order systems are built or administered as securely as Amazon.com.
I got scammed by this too, bought a book on digital archiving from amazon only to discover it was just a p.o.d collection of wikipedia articles. I did an ISBN web search just in case I was being dim, but nowhere in any catalogue this book is being advertised in was there any mention of wikipedia. Not amused.
I also made the mistake of buying one of their books, published under the Alphascript name.
At the time, there were no warnings anywhere when you ordered them through Amazon that they were a copy paste job taken from Wikipedia articles.
My first sign something was wrong was when I started reading it. Arrows everywhere indicating old hyperlinks, making for clunky reading.
Here I was, hoping for a serious book about Ancient Egypt to add to my library, but all fonts representing hieroglyphs were missing. As for irrelevant articles, there were some, like reading at the top of one page that if I need to know more about the “Kheper robot” or “Yu-Gi-Oh” in the notes…yeah. I’ll leave it at these two examples.
I wonder if these three editors simply just lent their names, or were the official copy-paster of the articles. I wouldn’t call that editing. Did they even work for the company and under what function? Heck, do these people even exist?
In any case, sent the book back and got a refund.
More deceptiveness: There’s a “Sin City (Film)” book from these publishers, and it has a “look inside this book” link. The link shows the contents of the graphic novel with a note saying “This view is of the Paperback edition (2010) from Dark Horse. The Paperback edition (2010) from Alphascript Publishing that you originally viewed is the one you’ll receive if you click the Add to Cart button at left.” (link here)
The same thing happens with a book on Cerebral Palsy (“This view is of the Hardcover edition (2005) from Springer. The Paperback edition (2010) from Alphascript Publishing that you originally viewed is the one you’ll receive if you click the Add to Cart button at left.”)
Whatever algorithm Amazon is using to map different editions of the same book is failing badly here and contributing to this scam.
They make money not by selling the books to actual readers, but by selling the single copy of each title that some distributors will automatically order when the book is “released” as print on demand. The distributors (such as Amazon) do this to cut down on the time it takes to print a book on demand, and then ship it, which can be up to 30 days. The point isn’t to sell the books to anyone, but to be a parasite off the distrubution model that a company like Amazon has put in place to help its *actual* customers who buy books.
Basically these “publications” are the equivalent of link-spam in a google search, meaning that if enough companies start doing this to take advantage of Amazon and other online book stores, unless those stores catch on and do something about how they stock, the ability to search those sites will become broken.
This is a scam that only works until enough people complain about the publisher to the book seller, or the book seller realizes they have thousands of dollars tied up in what are essentially unsellable pulp.
I’ve seen this before with print on demand, just never on this kind of scale.
[...] at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic [...]