Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 141 posts

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#111

Post by drucken »

rwg wrote: post #7

Just what Amazon needs: 800,000 computer-generated books crapping up the listings along with the thousands of on-demand printed copies of Wikipedia articles. Wonderful.

So ... automated content aggregation in book format?

Is it it just me or does it seem odd that the agents with the most,

* technology

* resources (spanning all non-technology areas including business and legal)

* digital content access

* familiarity

* etc.

chose not to create such offerings, not even via subsidiary or ex-employees.

I'm talking, of course, of agents such as Google.

To me this speaks volumes of whether this is ultimately (legally) viable...

Note. Publicity around this particular offering has been around since at least 2007, from what I can tell.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#112

Post by robryan »

jrabone wrote: post #88

Aw, man. I used to hate this guy when I worked on the title authority team. The programmatic titles alone often caused the title matchers to infer that all the books were somehow related, and cluster them all together. Oh, the happy hours spent unpicking the resulting mess. The Wikipedia guy was the worst in terms of sheer pointlessness though. Personally I'd delete the lot of them. Hard to think that your job is wor…

This extends into lots of areas on the marketplace. I spend a bit of time looking at some of the listings our products have been matched to by UPC and working out just which product the listing is trying to sell. Often the title/ image/ description can be describing different products.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#113

Post by robryan »

thetrb wrote: post #53
justhw wrote: post #15

This [1] The 2009-2014 Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats in Greater China seems to be the most reviewed book (35) at 3.3 stars, being sold for $495 USD. [1] http://www.amazon.com/2009-2014-Outlook-Toilet-Seats-Greater...

If it was $4.95 I might have ordered it as a Christmas gift. But $495 is slightly too much...

Yeah, there might be more of a market for actually buying these books as jokes.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#114

Post by robryan »

Thrall wrote: post #54
xefer wrote: post #23

How does it determine the price? By the pound? Amazon should clearly mark these as computer generated. I'll bet most of the purchases are from people who didn't know what they were even getting.

Is there evidence that anyone's actually bought one?

Some people tend to assign a fair bit of trust to the Amazon brand (which may be eroded by things like this). The fact that a book is on Amazon may convince some people that it is a book of a quality you would usually expect from traditionally published works.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#115

Post by jacobr »

Libraries in Sweden, and probably in other countries as well, have their own "algorithms" to decide what to purchase - at a university it could be everything related to a particular topic, for instance. This means that these computer-generated books are in stock in many libraries (at the taxpayer's expense).

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#117

Post by Confusion »

msutherl wrote: post #43
rwg wrote: post #7

Just what Amazon needs: 800,000 computer-generated books crapping up the listings along with the thousands of on-demand printed copies of Wikipedia articles. Wonderful.

I can't believe this guy has no sense of humor[1]! He's completely serious about providing a service and making tons of money from it. In one question the interviewer asks: 'could you make a novel for instance?' to which he replies 'well, novels don't usually make money'. Wouldn't you think the correct answer would be 'well, it wouldn't be very good'? Hauntology at its best[2]. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Wu…

Your second link: I have no idea what it says. I read the citation and the first four paragraphs. It sounds like it came out of a postmodernism generator.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#118

Post by powershop-co »

duey wrote: post #58

I work in ecommerce and this guy and others like him have been creating this stuff for 3-4 years. It's a massive annoyance for us as the only real identifier we got from suppliers is the publisher name, we blocked them for awhile but then we started seeing a massive range of publisher names coming through in order to get around blocks (I assume every other retailer was blocking them as well). When we first started se…

I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to "hellban" them. When they visit the site, they see the books - but for all other users they'd effectively be invisible. It might not be worth the programming effort, though. I wonder how many books this guy sells.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#119

Post by michaelt »

potatolicious wrote: post #56
msutherl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe this guy has no sense of humor[1]! He's completely serious about providing a service and making tons of money from it. In one question the interviewer asks: 'could you make a novel for instance?' to which he replies 'well, novels don't usually make money'. Wouldn't you think the correct answer would be 'well, it wouldn't be very good'? Hauntology at its best[2]. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Wu…

> "to which he replies 'well, novels don't usually make money'. Wouldn't you think the correct answer would be 'well, it wouldn't be very good'?" Perhaps the same question can be posed to many startup founders in our community. Very often people in the startup scene seem much more interested in extracting profit (or really, just making the exit) rather than creating something good (in whatever way that you might pers…

Plenty of developers write software never hoping to make a dime from it or hire anyone else to work on it. But they have little reason to worry about incorporation or branding or 'pivoting' or 'series a funding' or 'growth hacking', and they self-identify as 'open source developers' rather than 'start up entrepreneurs'.

Re: Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

#120

Post by fla »

philparker wrote: post #93
bangbang wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not see your texts as noise in the literary signal?

In many of the langauges/subjects we work in there is very little content published. We avoid areas where there are substanial titles availability already.

Of course, otherwise buyers would compare your content to real books ;)
Post reply on HN