Today is Wednesday, home of our usual “Resource Of The Week” post where we pick some book and share it with you. Today while browsing Amazon to find something suitable, I once again ran into what is quickly growing over Amazon faster than Kudzu and frankly, I’m sick and tired of it and can’t take it anymore.
As a word of warning, I depart from our usual visualization and graphics oriented coverage and bring you a word of warning about “VDM Publishing”, “BetaScript”, and “AlphaScript”, three companies that are colluding to turn my favorite online reseller of books into a junkyard of scraped internet content. If you want to know the full details, read after the break.
For those of you who don’t care, then be sure to tune in again next week and I’ll have a real book for you 🙂
Reposted from my Personal Blog, with my permission. Hah.
I spend a lot of time on Amazon these days. I post several links via my Affiliate Account to the VizWorld Store and various articles there, and I’m always on the lookout for new books to recommend. Recently though, I’ve noticed several books being posted that look like this:
Look closely there, because it’s important. Some things to notice:
- The titles are long, and don’t form sentences.. Just comma delimited sets of vaguely related words.
- The same 3 authors
- All boast 1-used copy at an outrageous price
- Look at the publishing dates.. March 5th and March 7th.. Feb 18 and 19.
All of these come from a company listed as BetaScript Publishing
, which from their website is owned by VDM publishing. How can they possibly be such prolific writers, you ask? The answer is simple, and comes straight from any of their book descriptions (This one taken from Winslow Homer: Landscape Painter, Printmaker, Illustrator, Oil Painting, Apprenticeship
)
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 ? September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art. Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.
That’s right, they are literally cut-and-pasting WikiPedia articles en-masse into books, and selling the prints at prices starting at $40, and going into the hundreds. It has to be some kind of automated process that starts on one page, grabs several related pages, and keeps going like a Search Engine Spider until it hits some desired page count. But they aren’t the only one. VDM seems to have realized that a single publisher is easy to filter out, and created AlphaScript Publishing which does the same thing. Hit their website for a bit of deja-vu and any of their books to see the same kind of garbage (this taken from Architectural Glass: Building Material, Glazing, Glass, Crown Glass (Window), Cylinder Blown Sheet, Machine Drawn Cylinder Sheet, Polished Plate, Float … Brick, Laminated Glass, Toughened Glass
). Apparently someone realized that putting “by Wikipedia” in the description was a dead giveaway, so now the descriptions are just completely useless dictionary cut-n-paste.
Architectural glass is glass that is used as a building material. It is most typically used as transparent glazing material in the building envelope, including windows in the external walls. Glass is also used for internal partitions and as an architectural feature. When used in buildings, glass is often of a safety type, which include reinforced, toughened and laminated glasses.
These things make using Amazon for any kind of technical content just useless. Today I was in search of a book on the details of BluRay, and all I could find was wikipedia articles about it.
Is Amazon oblivious to this? Are they even aware? If they are, then are they passively condoning such blatant plagiarism because they get their cut? Is Wikipedia aware of this? Do they have any recourse, given that VDM publishing is German?
Apparently VDM used to be reputable, buying up dissertations and thesis and printing & selling them, giving the original authors a chance to see their work published (which is apparently a requirement at certain German institutions). You can see the results from a few people in this forum thread. The authors have a chance to make a bit of money, if it’s a popular work, but it has to be pretty popular.
The 12% royalty, after taking into account discounts and other factors, translates into 5.6% of the book’s selling price. This means, you need sales of $16,780 to reach the threshold for cash payment. At a hypothetical book price of $79, this is 212 copies per year.
Apparently at some point along the way, VDM simply cashed out entirely and went to “Scrape it, bind it, sell it” .. I see nothing in their catalog of use, it’s all raw Wikipedia dumps.
And frankly, it’s starting to piss me off.
Hello,
I agree entirely. Impulsive is the keyword. I didn’t need my dissertation published but I did want the scholarship “out there.” VDM’s quality was its draw and again; I was shocked at the price.
If you go to my VDM site on Amazon I’ve directed people to the same book without an index, for $85.00 less! Great reviews; but poor printing; and formatting. I would have been happy if I never heard the words “Printer On Demand.”
Although the book ($17.99) sells, I still was not satisfied. I wanted to share what took a life time to learn, and six years to put together. So I took the advice of students and colleagues and reworked it again for general readership. It’s out this month as “The Republic” and I’m finally satisfied with an affordable version that offers general readership an explanation of the vision of the Revolution and their generation, without having to learn “why we know what we know.” In fact each Chapter begins with a Summary, to aid students and general readership to digest the many subjects of each chapter. Or as one reviewer put it “… weav[ing] together elements of ancient and modern history, economics, philosophy, religion and education.”
Now readers will not be distracted by footnotes on every page, and explanations of what scholarship or historical non-fiction is. Now it’s just a story; and all the academic “stuff” is at the back of the book.
I published research that took six years. It was everything I expected; except the price. $100 or 79 Euros.
I keep asking VDM to reduce the price because I want people to read it and who is going to pay that much? They refuse to lower the price and subsequently I’ve not a chance to sell the book. I’ve not sold a book and my sales rank on Amazon is more than six million!!!!
See the book here: http://alturl.com/iodj