Oeuvres épuisées. Numérisation des livres qu'on n'édite plus : qui y gagne ? Major online book retailers are selling Wikipedia articles as books. Online retailers Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Eason are selling books whose contents have been taken directly from Wikipedia.
Published by companies called AlphaScript Publishing and BetaScript Publishing, the books can sell from anywhere between €20 and €150 and cover topics from the history of Star Wars to instructions on roasting coffee. At the time of writing Amazon lists over 300,000 books by the publishers, Eason list over 4,700 books and Barnes and Noble list 117,000 titles. The odd tale of Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing.
This is one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen on the internet.
A company variously calling itself Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing is taking articles from Wikipedia and publishing them as books. It would appear that the act of doing that is legal, but from the outside, many of the books give the appearance of having been put together by some automated system, because the titles (and presumably contents) seem to be comprised of a Wikipedia page forming the starting point for the book and then a load of other Wikipedia pages which are linked-to from that page. It’s all very strange. As an example of what I mean, the book shown here is rather oddly called (deep breath) Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.
So presumably the subjects have some connection.