There is a fascinating article in The New York Times by Noam Cohen about a man who wrote 200,000 books. His name is Philip M. Parker and he didn't exactly write the books, he "assembled" them, with the aid of computers.
"Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.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."
I guess it's not too surprising that someone like Harriet Klausner has used computers to fake book reviews, or that Grady Harp seems to possess some type of robotic voting program to boost his Amazon ranking, this man actually is using computers to compile books.The article goes on to say:
"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.”
Soon those people who like romance novels will have Mr. Parker's computer generated romances to look forward to. Who would like to wager that Harriet Klausner will give them all five stars?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
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Noam Cohen wrote:"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."
As C.S.Lewis wrote:"Nothing is harder to point out to someone who has genuinely lost sight of it than the obvious."
> While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds
> of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens,
He makes up on volume ;-) But it is interesting how this is possible though. What kind of stuff does he write?
In addition to all sorts of books on medical topics the article said he also writes poetry. I can think of few things worse than computer written poetry. It's also interesting to see that he thinks writing a successful romance novel is as simple as cataloguing various body parts. I wonder if even Harriet Klausner will find his novels worthy of five star reviews on Amazon.
Ah all right, that's kinda what I thought. So he's more of a compiler of books rather than a writer. Poetry, if something something Eliot-like, I'm sure could be done too. Novels, now, that's another story, I'd be interested to look at a machine-assembled one if he ever gets to that... the comment about body parts is telling. He may be one of those propellerheads who think they know and can everything (not that they've ever tried).
Btw, here's a very good demonstration of what's possible, The Famous, One and Only, CHOMSKY BOT! Check it out, it's funny.
http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl
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