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

[Joshua Gay]

This won't work. The problem is that these books are not being clearly
marketed as printed Wikipedia articles. So, marketing your books as up to
date printed versions of Wikipedia articles isn't going to be competing with
these books.

I recommend doing a positive campaign where you encourage people to log onto
amazon and leave helpful comments and tag and categorize books
appropriately.

However, I don't think this is the work of the foundation. I think some
active wikipedians and wikimedians should bring this to the community. If I
had more energy I would do it myself, and here is what I would do:

1) Write a blog post encouraging people to log onto Amazon and write a
short, respectable, and helpful comment on the books so that consumers can
understand the situation.

2) Get this blog post translated into a few languages.

3) Write an email that asks the reader to:
* Pass this email on to others
* Vote the story up on various news aggregator sites (Digg, etc).
* Go to the page and read the blog for more details and to take part in this
collaborative effort to inform consumers.

4) Send it out to a lot of people (many thousand).

5) Release a short press release about the blog and the people joining in
this effort and send that out to various news sources.

-Josh

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> > The single best way to kill them is to reprint the exact same books, then
> sell them at the low low price of cost + 10%. When people start snapping
> them up like fruitcakes, Alphascript will be finished.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> Not just the same books, but the same books corrected and updated.
>
> Ec
>
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