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