books for sale

["James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

Jan Velterop pointed to a Suddeutsche Zeitung article about books 
that appear to be no more than compilation of Wikipedia articles. 
The book highlighted in that article came from the publisher 
whose URL and "about" appear below and bear reading.  "10,000 new 
titles" and "copyleft projects" are phrases that will give food 
for thought.

Such books are an additional contribution to a new flood of 
"books for sale" on familiar sites, including Amazon and 
Abebooks.  Cassiodorus is a sixth century AD author I've known 
for many years.  Look for him on Abebooks now and find that of 
the first 50 hits for that author, forty are print-on-demand 
reprints from Google books and the like of volumes of very 
limited, if any, value.  The lowest-priced several copies 
available offer a title that he never wrote, but that appears to 
be a garbled version of something he did write.  Three of the top 
50 are scholarly monographs of very limited value and reach, but 
at least they are real books at real prices.  The other seven are 
copies of a 1946 translation of one of his works whose 
introductory section of c. 60 pages was, as I pointed out in 
print thirty years ago, substantially plagiarized from a 19th 
century volume.  It gets harder and harder to buy a good book.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown

http://www.alphascript-publishing.com/
Welcome to Alphascript Publishing

Alphascript publishing publishes academic research worldwide - at 
no cost to our authors.

Annually, we publish more than 10,000 new titles and are thus one 
of the leading publishing houses of academic research. We 
specialize in publishing copyleft projects.

>From the large number of texts that are continuously being 
completed, we identify those which - due to their quality and 
practical relevance - are suitable for publication. In this way, 
the latest research is conveyed quickly and tailored to the needs 
of the respective specialist audience.

All monographs are published by Alphascript Publishing as a 
specialist book in a high-quality paperback fitting with an 
individual cover image, ISBN and barcode. Our titles are produced 
on-site in the USA, UK and Germany, and distributed worldwide via 
the leading retailers.

***