[FoRK] The Man Who Wrote 200,000 Books

[Jeff Bone]

Speaking of bots (or perhaps in this case, "cyborgs" would be more  
appropriate)...

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=2&dpc&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

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April 14, 2008

LINK BY LINK

He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)

By NOAM COHEN
It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And  
then there is the table of contents. If you want the book to be  
categorized, either by a bookseller or a library, it has to be  
assigned a unique numerical code, like an ISBN, for International  
Standard Book Number. There have to be proper margins. Finally,  
there’s the back cover.

Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing.

Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has  
generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search onAmazon.com  
under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the  
most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes  
money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s  
Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler  
Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and  
Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook  
for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6- 
Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate  
to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also  
the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business  
school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has  
developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available  
information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to  
70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into  
books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and  
printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr.  
Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas  
on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may  
sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often  
to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has  
extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and  
even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new  
algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many  
body parts.”

Perusing a work like the outlook for bathmat sales in India, a reader  
would be hard pressed to find an actual sentence that was “written” by  
the computer. If you were to open a book, you would find a title page,  
a detailed table of contents, and many, many pages of graphics with  
introductory boilerplate that is adjusted for the content and genre.

While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer  
generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out  
himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to  
rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia,  
complained: “The book is more of a template for ‘generic health  
researching’ than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of  
such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is  
just a search and replace away.”

When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote  
back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and  
frustrating.”Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe  
argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he  
said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But,  
Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have  
found these guides useful.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr.  
Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple  
ofHenry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting  
books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we  
automated.”

He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to  
do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”

In an interview from his home in San Diego and his offices nearby, Mr.  
Parker described his motivation as providing content that the  
marketplace has otherwise neglected for lack of an audience. That can  
mean a relatively obscure language is involved, or a relatively  
obscure disease or a relatively obscure product.

Take, for example, the study of bathmats in India.

“Only one person in the world may be interested in that,” he conceded,  
“probably a strategic planner for a multinational that makes those.”  
But he points out that once he has trained the computer to take data  
about past sales and make complex calculations to project future  
sales, each new book costs him about 12 cents in electricity. Since  
these books are print-on-demand or delivered electronically, he is  
ahead after the first sale, he said.

His company, the Icon Group International, is the long tail of the  
bell curve come to life — generating significant total sales by adding  
up tens of thousands of what might be called worst sellers. For  
example, a search at the Galter Health Sciences Library of the  
Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University found half a  
dozen Icon books, mainly in the library for patients and their families.

Icon is “a very innovative and interesting example of print on  
demand,” said Kurt Beidler, a senior manager at Amazon.com who runs  
the publishers’ services for BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand  
company. “A lot of examples of print on demand take older books and  
bring them back — really acting as a supply-chain tool. In this kind  
of business, it’s a new business, using this capability to introduce  
new material to customers.”

Mr. Parker compares his methods to those of a traditional publisher,  
but with the computer simply performing some of the scut work. In an  
explanatory YouTube video, Mr. Parker shows a book being created. The  
computer is given an assignment — project the latent demand for  
antipsychotic drugs around the world, based on the sales figures in  
the United States.

“Using a little bit of artificial intelligence, a computer program has  
been created that mimics the thought process of someone who would be  
responsible for doing such a study,” Mr. Parker says. “But rather than  
taking many months to do the study. the computer accomplishes this in  
about 13 minutes.”

An editor picks the years to be covered, but the computer picks the  
optimum model for extrapolating sales in various countries, and in  
alphabetical order produces a chart for each country. “It will then  
open a Word document and export the information into Word just like a  
real author would out of their minds, so to speak, or spreadsheets,”  
he says.

Artificial intelligence researchers say computers are far from being  
what the general public would consider authors.

“There is a continuous spectrum, also known as a slippery slope,  
between a program that automatically typesets a telephone directory  
and a program that generates English texts at the level of variety you  
would expect from a typical human English speaker,” said Chung-chieh  
Shan, an assistant professor in the computer science department of  
Rutgers. “The former program is easy to write, the latter program is  
very difficult; in fact, the holy grail of linguistics. Like Mad-Libs,  
Parker’s programs probably lie somewhere between the two ends of this  
spectrum.”

Mr. Parker has lately taken to lighter fare intended to educate. He  
said he had invested “up to seven figures into the animation business”  
for word-based video games and animated game shows that will teach  
English to non-English speakers. YouTube has many examples of these  
games, which have computer- generated scripts.

A low-tech version of those games are the thousands of crossword  
puzzle books Mr. Parker has made in about 20 languages. The clues are  
in a foreign language and the answers are in English. The computer  
designs the puzzles and ensures that the words become harder as one  
progresses.

As part of his love of words, and dictionaries in all languages, Mr.  
Parker said he has taken to having his computers create acrostic poems  
— where the first letter of a series of words spells a synonym of  
those words, often to ironic effect.

Of course, one of the difficulties of generating a hundred thousand  
poems is stepping back and assessing their quality.

“Do you think one of them is Shakespeare?” he was asked.

“No,” he said. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”

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jb