[Foundation-l] Alphascript Publishing: 1900+ copy&pasted books from Wikipedia

[Joshua Gay]

When I worked for the FSF I helped to run a campaign against the
Amazon Kindle (and, DRM in general). We did an action called "The
Kindle Swindle" in which we asked people to tag all DRM ebooks and the
kindle itself with the tags "kindle swindle" and "DRM".

People went ahead and tagged close to a thousand products with the
term "Kindle Swindle" and the Kindle advice was tagged with that
phrase close to 400 times making it become one of the top four tags on
the Kindle page.

What is kind of neat is that for each tag-term has its own discussion
forum. The "Kindle Swindle" tag has a relatively active set of
discussion threads [1], and the original comment I wrote [2] has over
250 replies to it.

I imagine some combination of blogging, tagging, and letter writing
could help in some way to increase consumer awareness and this kind of
work can be done in a distributed fashion by wikimedians worldwide.

footnotes
:[1] http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle%20swindle?ref_=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t
:[2] http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle%20swindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx9U9IIOS8R4U3&cdThread=TxEMQ1LM199AP8&displayType=tagsDetail


On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Renata St<renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> It was raised before on the Village Pump, but I think this is so disturbing
> that we ought to do something.
>
> "Alphascript Publishing" has published over 1900 (and counting) books, all
> available on Amazon. Prices range from $31 to $179. All of these books are
> simple computer-generated copies from Wikipedia and (at least according to
> one Amazon reviewer) couple other public domain websites. Trouble is, from
> book description page there is absolutely no way of knowing that the book is
> a Wikipedia mirror on paper. At least several Amazon buyers have been
> fooled. What really gets my blood boiling is that Amazon user "VDM Verlag
> Dr.Müller" (I think someone exposed him as 100% shareholder of the
> publishing co) goes on rating these products as "five star"....
>
> The publisher seems to observe the copyright (even includes full edit
> history) so legal action seems impossible. Someone already contacted Amazon,
> but they "are not responsible for the quality of books sold". In the
> meantime the number of such books grew from 900 in June to almost 2000 as of
> today... I think we should do something. At the very least publishing
> product reviews warning that what this is....
>
> See:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PrimeHunter/Alphascript_Publishing_sells_free_articles_as_expensive_books
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_20#The_Alphascript-Amazon-Wikipedia_book_hoax
> http://rufftoon.livejournal.com/59337.html
>
> Thanks,
> Renata
>
> P.S. on a happier note: half of Wikipedia editors now can claim to be
> "published authors".
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