lemansvk
Donation Time
This is something I found out about via the Bellett forum. Someone calling himself Frederic P Miller is downloading text from Wikipedia, sending it to a "print on demand" self-publishing house called Alphaprint and advertising the books through places like Amazon, Booktopia, Abe Books and many others. The books are advertised at substantial prices - $60 upwards but basically consist of Wikipedia printouts of varying accuracy, doubtful relevance and questionable reproduction quality - eg what is colour in Wikipedia will be black and white in the book. Wikipedia articles may of course be viewed and downloaded free of charge, sometimes contain animations and usually have active links.
Miller has titles listed for various Hillman, Humber, Sunbeam subjects, such as;
http://tinyurl.com/29vojmz
http://tinyurl.com/2wnw3bm
http://tinyurl.com/2cbvpmm
It's not just books on cars - "Miller" (if that's his real name) currently has 77,000+ books listed on Amazon at the moment, on all sorts of topics: Wine, films, musicals, Pokemon, etc etc.
One of the Bellet forum members bought an Isuzu Florian book. It has a copy+paste of the Wikipedia Florian article, the general Isuzu article, the Bellel and Isuzu Aska Wikipedia articles, plus articles on the Isuzu P'up and Chevrolet LUV; it also has Wikipedia articles on "Sedan" as an automotive concept; the development of said body style , as well as a similar article dealing with the history and concept of the 'station wagon. (the Bookseller Booktopia is going to refund him after he complained)
The giveaways for the books are The editors name, the Alphaprint self publishing connection, and the Green label on front of book saying "High quality content by Wikipedia articles".
So don't get burned folks. And you might think of spreading the word to any other forums you are on.
Cheers, Vic
Miller has titles listed for various Hillman, Humber, Sunbeam subjects, such as;
http://tinyurl.com/29vojmz
http://tinyurl.com/2wnw3bm
http://tinyurl.com/2cbvpmm
It's not just books on cars - "Miller" (if that's his real name) currently has 77,000+ books listed on Amazon at the moment, on all sorts of topics: Wine, films, musicals, Pokemon, etc etc.
One of the Bellet forum members bought an Isuzu Florian book. It has a copy+paste of the Wikipedia Florian article, the general Isuzu article, the Bellel and Isuzu Aska Wikipedia articles, plus articles on the Isuzu P'up and Chevrolet LUV; it also has Wikipedia articles on "Sedan" as an automotive concept; the development of said body style , as well as a similar article dealing with the history and concept of the 'station wagon. (the Bookseller Booktopia is going to refund him after he complained)
The giveaways for the books are The editors name, the Alphaprint self publishing connection, and the Green label on front of book saying "High quality content by Wikipedia articles".
So don't get burned folks. And you might think of spreading the word to any other forums you are on.
Cheers, Vic