Isuzu Vehicross book scam at Amazon.com

[deermagnet]

I was over at Amazon and saw an Isuzu Vehicross book. I thought it might be a history of the VX or something collectors may want for their VX stuff collection. A search shows the "book" is linked all over the place with not much info. So I looked up the publisher, Alphascript Publishing, and got the story.

Alphascript Publishing sells free articles as expensive books!

"An Amazon.com book search gives 1009 "books" from Alphascript Publishing, an imprint of VDM Publishing Group. 1003 of the books are described as "by John McBrewster, Frederic P. Miller, and Agnes F. Vandome". They are called editors in the book listings. A recent "author" is named as "Mainyu Eldon A." or similar. It seems the only content of the many books is free Wikipedia articles, with no sign that these three people have contributed to them. The books often have very long titles that are full of keywords. Presumably, this is to make them more likely to be found when searching on sites such as Amazon.com.

The articles are often poorly printed with features like missing characters from foreign languages, and numerous images of arrows where Wikipedia had links. It appears much better to read the original articles for free at the Wikipedia website than paying a lot of money for what has been described as a scam or hoax. Advertising for the books at Amazon and elsewhere does not reveal the free source of all the content. It is only revealed inside the books, which may satisfy the license requirements for republishing of Wikipedia articles."

I just wanna make sure none of our members come across this and make a quick impulse buy without checking it out. As always, be careful on the internets.

Mark Griffin

[vt_maverick]

From their own website, selected parts of an interview with a British newspaper:

30.09.2009
In August 2009 Alphascript publishing was contacted by British daily newspaper „The Guardian” (editor: Alison Flood) – we publish here some parts of the interview:


Q: …do all of Alphascript’s books take their content from Wikipedia?

Alphascript: Yes, since we believe that the quality of the Wikipedia-articles is so good that it is worthwhile creating books with them. Wikipedia themselves give an impulse for this. The articles published on their sites are free in every respect and without any limitations as to further use. All authors participating in texts of Wikipedia know this or should at least know it.

The vice-versa procedure by now seems to have become “normal”. For years Google has been scanning books and published them in internet. Of course there are also protests, but then the rights for the material concerned are still with the author or the publishing house.

There is no discussion regarding digitalization of books – mostly old ones – which are free of rights.

Q: If so, shouldn’t this be made clear in the product description?

Alphascript: It is pointed out in every Alphascript book that contents are Wikipedia articles. Do we now have to write in Amazon-books: “Attention! Books contains Wikipedia!”?

Then other publishing houses would have to point out in their books: “Attention! Book contains nonsense!”, or: “Attention! Book has only sex-scenario!”

Q: What do you intend to do about the customer complaints?

Alphascript: We are of the opinion: Of course you can have all these contents free of charge from Wikipedia, but there is a reason for having bought a book on a specific topic. Under certain circumstances you are more up-to-date with an Alphascript-book instead of buying a book of last year the contents of which are possibly not up-to-date any more.

We do live in rapidly passing times.

Q: It would be great to also find out a bit more about Alphascript itself: what you publish, who you're aiming it at…

Alphascript: We offer our readers a well-founded content, which up to the moment of publication as a book has continuously been updated and controlled. Alphascript publishing is internet in form of a book. There can hardly be a faster process. And this is what we are aiming for.

Amazing arrogance.

[vt_maverick]

An article from Wikipedia on the company that publishes articles from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing

I wonder if you can buy the Wikipedia article on VDM Publishing in the form of a VDM published book?

[wekilled]

I wonder if they are printed in the "almost English" of the interview. They seem pretty unapologetic for their efforts.

Thanks for the heads up.