The Book of Me

My goodness, I just discovered Mike Glyer by L’Egaire Humphrey – tragically missing the opportunity to buy it at full price. “Thought you might like to see that this book about *you* has been shamelessly marked down….,” says Robert Lichtman’s sympathetic e-mail.

The Ebay listing shows this magisterial work was first published in 2011. It runs 72 pages. The original price was $64.88. Now they’re asking $50.54.

This is “A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.”

Unread? Surely that can’t be right.

I will say the manual typewriter on the cover captures me perfectly. I especially like the guarantee of “High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA Articles.”

(But — 72 pages of stuff about me in the Wikipedia? And I thought they didn’t care!)

10 thoughts on “The Book of Me

  1. What kind of typewriter is that? It’s not a standard English keyboard (AZERTY rather than QWERTY).

  2. It’s funny in this case – but it’s also a major (legal) scam. Wikipedia content is public domain, and a few years ago a number of companies started reproducing sections of it verbatim in the form of these “books”, adding a fake “author” or “editor” name, and selling them on eBay at high prices. As far as I can tell there’s no editing and no work involved, other than probably using an automated program to copy the Wiki content.

    The prices are absurd, but someone must be buying – just check the feedback numbers on that seller, for example. Complaints to eBay are ignored, as there’s nothing illegal in doing this.

  3. Heh. Remember, there was a similar book on me about a year ago. These guys are in Europe, as I remember, but keep a fake head office in the Muldives or someplace where they’re all but beyond the reach of the law, then just copy text out of Wikipedia. Print quality is crap. Whenever some sucker orders the “book” the print a copy out on the office copier. What you get is a cerlox bound, 8 1/2 by 11document with generic cover art that you could have done a better job of yourself. Likely as not, Claud Press is the same people as BetaScript Publishing that did my “book”. Somebody should probably do a book on them…

  4. I actually bought a book of this sort (compiled Wikipedia content), for a much more reasonable price (under $20), from one of the major online booksellers. It’s a list of D&D monsters, with some other supplementary material, and my son seemed to enjoy it as a gift.

  5. I’ve looked up a few writers on Amazon, and found biographies and selected articles. They seem to be published on demand collections of Wikipedia material. Anf the price is steep.

    One of many times I’ve found certain strange things on Amazon. As In print books for $999.

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