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

extremetech.com

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

#131
post #126
post #33

Reminds me of SCIgen: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ Generate conference-ready CS papers in seconds!

Thank you, you made my day. This is really fantastic, I particularly appreciate the nonsensical scales on the graphs (time expressed in dB, number of CPU in Joules) and the hilarious fake reference papers scattered with well known names (Even Erdos :).

You might be entertained to know that a peer-reviewed journal went as far as to accept a generated paper for publication.

http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102

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

#132

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…

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.

I'm sorry to hear that you're not familiar enough with cultural theory to understand the post. Just as somebody unfamiliar with mathematics would be hard-pressed to understand (and understand the point of) the jumble of symbols, it requires some immersion in the field to extract any value from cultural theory. If you can make the time in your life, I recommend it.

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

#133

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…

It's not that he has no sense of humor, it's that the fact that the books aren't good is a foregone conclusion. The idea that one of his books could be good is just not even on his radar.

But it seems the opposite from the interview, no? He seems to believe that he is creating legitimate value. There is no mention of the error in the process.

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

#134
post #129

>> Because of his specialty in marketing, it’s easy to assume that these books are designed for spam-like purposes I just want to know, is this even legal? Is he selling books? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book "The body of all written works including books is literature. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature "Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms—fiction and non-fiction—and two major techni…

If you go looking for overly specific definitions of words in natural language, which is effectively defined by its usage, any conclusions you draw from these 'definitions' will be flawed at best. Obtaining your fundamental definitions from selected lines in wikipedia adds bias as well as inaccuracies. Also, even assuming your definitions were reasonable, you fail to explore the possibility that his books are poetry.

Wiki articles can be maintained by anyone, feel free to correct/improve the ones I referenced.

I did not fail to consider the poetry route, I ignored it because poetry comes from human emotion and human feeling.

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

#135
Hey, this gives me a great idea: I could write a program that will gather email addresses on the web and automatically email my sales pitch to every single one of them. And I could sell both this program and my email lists to other companies willing to pay for them.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even bubble sort is an algorithm...

Bubble sort does something .

So does indexing "Random high-level items". It's an algorithm, just not a particularly good one, which was my point.

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

#138
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…

Why does Amazon allow it? It's somewhere between outright fraud, and DOSing or Amazon's search functionality; It's clearly something that constitutes abuse.

Similarly, if I were to fund a human team of title-writers to create plausible original titles for a hundred original titles per hour, and fill the actual pages with random words from the OED... Advertising that as a book on a particular topic would likely be some type of fraud. The result is not far from what I've seen of this guy's work.

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

#139
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.

These aren't actually 'books'. They're mostly business reports, which I hate to say, are already programmatically compiled by interns repetitively applying formulas in spreadsheets and building graphs from database queries. That's why they cost more than paperbacks, because "The 2009-2014 Outlook for Plastics Lamp Shades in the United States" is essential for the people in the business.

He also has medical dictionaries which seem to confuse his cause, as he explains "For health titles, only the format editing and production side is automated. The text in the health books was written by medical professionals and edited by a professional editor; the computer expedited formatting using about 50 odd routines (the preface, chapter intros, glossaries, indexes, headings, margins, etc.)"

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

#140
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood that.

a misunderstanding could have been prevented if the parent poster gave a reason for his hyperbole.

If you take no responsibility for what's in your store, you'll have terrible, terrible stuff in your store. Oh look.
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