Cambridge University Press [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Nothing in the Amazon description of this book tells you it is only a mediocre quality printing of otherwise free Wikipedia articles. Why pay so much money for something you can print off for free -- and be assured you have the very latest information? The size of the book is so small the print is difficult to read. And, diagrams and the like are even more difficult to see clearly. In my opinion the publishers of this book should disclose the Wikipedia origins in the item description. With regard to the content itself: this is a hodge podge of largely unrelated articles.

All the information contained in the book can be found on Wikipedia, for free. In case you desperately wanted a formatted book in paper, then this product is for you.

The company publishing these books is a German company, VDM Verlag. Its book arms -- Alphascript and Betascript publishing -- use print-on-demand (POD) technologies and Wikipedia content. (see their catalogs on Amazon.) According to Slashdot, these publishers have added 57,000 titles to Amazon, more than 10,000 in the last month alone. The price points for these books are amazing -- many over $50 each and some much more -- apparently to make them seem more scholarly and specialized. Reviews on Amazon appear to be uniformly low, as buyers note the basic level of content, the source, and the free and up-to-date online version.

It is pointed out in every Alphascript book that contents are Wikipedia articles. My personal opinion: I actually think it's hilarious and demonstrates a phenomenal level of chutzpah. It's really the idea of taking the "long tail" to an extreme-grab a massive amount of free material (their content now makes up 1/35th of all the book content on Amazon), repackage it and (like spam or banner ads) you hope you get a tiny percentage of sales that ends up in a profit. The "values added" are selection and aggregation. Ironically, selection and aggregation are the primary values of scholarly journals as well, where the original articles are also free. It would take days, at least, to work through Wikipedia to find all the decent articles on given topics like these. One wonders how they do it? Do they use semantic technologies? If it is done by humans then each book is expensive to produce, POD or not. The concept as a whole is elegant, and a testimony to the value of Wikipedia. Selection and aggregation are difficult, expensive and valuable. People who don't want to pay are free to do the work themselves.

The real question to my mind is whether this is really "selection and aggregation", or at least "selection and aggregation" to a level of quality that's worth paying [...] or more for. They've got three editors each credited with around 17,000 to 18,000 books. How much time do you think they're devoting to carefully curating these collections? How difficult, expensive, valuable and elegant is the work if three people can do 10,000 books a month? Based on a couple of actual reviews I've tracked down, the quality is actually pretty bad. And another downside, browsing Amazon subject headings in reverse chronological order used to be a reasonably good way to become apprised of new and forthcoming publications in the area you were interested in. The amount of chaff has now gone up by an order of magnitude or more.