Stupid robot-generated spambook garbage
« previous post | next post »
Last October 24 the brilliant Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And on the same day another book was also published, by an alleged publisher called CreateSpace: It was called Fast and Slow Thinking, and advertised as having an author named Karl Daniels.
Only it is not really a book. It is a compilation of snippets from Wikipedia articles and the like, dressed up like a book. Edited by robots for you to buy by mistake. It's a spam book, part of the "gigantic, unstoppable tsunami of what can only be described as bookspam" that I spoke of last June. It was created purely to swim in the wake of the Kahneman book and snap up some spilled morsels of money. It's not a commercial success: its sales rank is 359,109; but people have bought it. Some regretful consumers talk about it on the Amazon page. Targeted spam pseudobooks! Is it just me, or is the world getting scummier and scummier as day follows day?
Don't answer that, it might depress me.
[Hat tip to Kevin Sullivan.]