Comments on: Man "writes" 200,000 books

By: Agent 86

Agent 86 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

"As he gently inserts his Error: noun349 undefined into her throbbing Error: unable to complete requested action."

By: creative intuition

creative intuition — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wonder how he made the linguistics AI software.

By: Xenu

Xenu — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Crichton will finally have some competition.

By: Dodobird

Dodobird — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

In this kind of situation “writing” is the wrong word to use. Compile or a word with a similar meaning would be much more correct.

By: Antinous

Antinous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, but The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India is probably a better read than Jurassic Park.

By: desmondhaynes

desmondhaynes — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Isn’t that what the spam blogs do too? take feeds and churn “articles”… Of course, the sophistication here is much higher, it may seem.

By: danegeld

danegeld — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

To quote the authors response to a complaint:

â€œIf you are good at the Internet, this book is uselessâ€, adding that [the customer] simply should not have bought it.

It reminds me of a second hand bookstore I found in Edinburgh one summer that sold books like groceries — you take what you want to the front desk and they weigh it and price it at Â£1.50/pound or so.

I think the RAND corporation is still king of the computer generated book, with their epic treatise,

“A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates”

ISBN/EAN: 0-8330-3047-7
(availabile in paperback for $90.00)

By: mark_at_flickeringpictures

mark_at_flickeringpictures — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wonder how much of that stuff is copyrighted, or lifted from inaccurate, unreliable blogs and things?

By: WeightedCompanionCube

WeightedCompanionCube — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

One billion random ones and zeros! Now with twos!

By: angry young man

angry young man — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A computer was used to generate a romance novel a decade or so ago. I had to review it, and if it wasn’t entirely terrible, it wasn’t more than your typical amateur drivel, much like when actual humans try to write a bestseller based on the 10-12 elements common to all bestsellers.

By: airship

airship — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written over 20 technical books, and I can tell you that the hard part isn’t deciding what to put in, but what to leave out. You want information in a book to be concise, digestible, and easy to find. My 400-page books would have been 10,000-page books if I’d included ALL of the information in my source material.

And what about the issue of combining and distilling related material? What good is a ‘book’ if it covers the same topic in 10 or 20 different places, most of it repetitively?

At best, this program is only performing the first step in the writing process – research. The result is nothing more than a pile of hopefully-relevant research notes. Like the guy says, if you’re good at searching the Internet, you can do the job yourself.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine you finding anyone willing to write a book on â€œThe 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in Indiaâ€. Not and remain sane, anyway.

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

So it’s wikipedia for the those living off the grid…..

By: l1XM0R3

l1XM0R3 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Actually, between 1927 and 1942, Marquis de Lalande (otherwise known as Hubert Puits) wrote 672 novels (mostly novellas and Romantic types of books) in a publishing factory he fashioned in Meudon. If he had a computer (or Memex) I’m sure he would’ve surpassed this gentleman’s number, so I’m unfortunately not impressed.

By: Doomstalk

Doomstalk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It sounds like the book equivalent of a splog.

By: Jamie Sue

Jamie Sue — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

#7 ROFL!

By: caxton

caxton — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a long and noble tradition of, and a strong argument for, compilation as an act of creation. Consider the AbbÃ© Migne, the mid-nineteenth century French scholar, schemer, and pyramid-scheme player who published almost 500 volumes of the writings of the (Catholic) Church Fathers – there’s a delightful book by H. Bloch on Migne.

By: Beezy

Beezy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had an idea like this once, but it involved a bunch of monkeys and some typewriters. It didn’t work out.

By: Iax

Iax — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe this guy is the reason why amazon is pretty much banning print on demand books?

By: aarrgghh

aarrgghh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

this sounds straight out of roald dahl’s “the great automatic grammatisator” (1960)

By: aeflash

aeflash — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thats what I was going to say…

It’s funny because in that story the first person to use their name on books written by the grammatizator was a romance novel writer…

By: howtoplayalone

howtoplayalone — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That was Julia’s job in 1984.

By: howtoplayalone

howtoplayalone — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That was Julia’s job in 1984…

By: vaughnd

vaughnd — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wonder what copyright issues surround this? Are you allowed to make money off content printed from Wikipedia? What about an online medical journal?

I reckon Ray Kurzweil could do better.