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Fake Books

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Re: Fake Books

#131

Post by Freak_NL »

masklinn wrote: post #88
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It turns out that there’s a whole lot of aspects of their scheme that would turn off any informed rational person. But there’s enough people who fail that test to keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their scheme.

In fact much as with “obvious” scams, this becomes a feature: non-marks deselect themselves from the pool at no cost to the scammer, which means the scammer has a much higher average “prospect quality” than a random sampling would give.

It's sort of like the spelling and grammar mistakes in spam mail.

Re: Fake Books

#132

Post by OliveOilOnChips »

mypastself wrote: post #40

Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people bothered to read the book in detail. I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.

> not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense

You treat Amazon reviews as credible information?

Wow!

Re: Fake Books

#133

Post by Dave3of5 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #47
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write yo…

This is a brilliant (but very sad) video. The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a month. I guess this is cheaper than using GPT-3 and having to prune out the flights of fancy/complete nonsense that GPT-3 can sometimes generate.

> The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a month

Actually they get $250 for 25,000. The $2500 is what they should get.

Re: Fake Books

#134

Post by svnt »

thn-gap wrote: post #109
marginalia_nu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affects older books too. I've found books that were very obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears, missing pages and the odd pencil lines. https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from…

I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then returning them since they clearly don't match the expected result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so they would stop doing this sort of scam.

Unfortunately I doubt it. If they are just printing on-demand low-quality books it seems they’d not be badly hurt as their variable costs are cheap paper and cheap ink.

If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of a Legends of Stuxnet, then you’d get somewhere.

Or if you figured out their business and determined if they sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop buying, and then do the mass return.

Re: Fake Books

#135

Post by jbverschoor »

pelasaco wrote: post #116

the book has 4 stars at Amazon. Positive reviews. It highlights another rabbit-hole: The fake reviews

So fake sellers are selling fake books, reviewed by fake reviewers, and they get fake crypto moneys, with which they can buy fake food, and live a fake life.

Fake sounds very much like reality

Re: Fake Books

#136

Post by svnt »

coldtea wrote: post #101

> I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My rebuttal to that was simple: it’s an exception, not a rule. My kids’ doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn’t fetch much Well, how about "value is an inherent consequence of scarcity with respect to demand"?

Author seems to understand supply and demand — they are making the point that the NFT perspective doesn’t include a rationale for demand.

Re: Fake Books

#137

Post by thaumasiotes »

thr0wnawaytod4y wrote: post #110
a3w wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is [bra] fake books and [ket] Amazons... I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign] Amazons... Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt ugly.

I thought it's just a fancy way to write (something and) something more important.

It took me two tries too; my first guess was "I think the problem is not as bad as fake books and worse than Amazon's fundamentally broken review system", but that didn't make sense.

The symbols are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of .

Re: Fake Books

#138

Post by pretext »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write yo…

It seems the aforementioned Mikkelson Twins are acting like meta-parasites: their scam is to sell the way how to scam somebody out of money.

Re: Fake Books

#139

Post by TeMPOraL »

elefanten wrote: post #114
mkl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What role do you have that requires that kind of output?

Corporate strategy consulting. 1 day to write 5k-10k words on a topic you have to research from scratch is not uncommon. It's all within a broad field of expertise and a sector you're familiar with, but could be products / companies / deals you'd never heard of. I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human…

Are those 5k-10k words completely new, or are document templates part of this count?

I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve, but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of a job.

Re: Fake Books

#140

Post by dspillett »

narag wrote: post #89
hex4def6 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with com…

Well, it's only logical: what they propose is barely legal and sooner or later, more sooner than later, the scheme will be burnt, so it's better to teach others to make a quick buck than staying in the same place for too long.

I don't think legality is a significant part of the problem – I simply doubt there is really a lot to make regardless of legality.

Most get-rich-quick schemes are really either “make a few pennies here or there, a few $/€/£ if you are lucky, a few 100 if very lucky” or “make-a-bit-slowly-with-lots-of-effort” or both. The rest not included in that “most” are even more completely bunkum, you'll never make anything unless maybe you join the pyramid and resell the scheme.

There is more easy money to be made selling make-money-easily schemes to those that lack critical thinking, than there is to be made via the schemes themselves. Even if no one you sell the scheme to makes anything, even if they all make a loss in the grand scheme of things, the scheme seller still has some revenue.

A scheme seeming illegal/immoral/both might make some marks easier to catch, as they think they are being clever by knowing that crime does in fact sometimes pay so their guard is further lowered due to confirmation bias on this matter.

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