I’m a big fan of Ellery Queen, the old-time mystery writer. I stumbled upon a new book about him, exciting since only one biography exists. The problem was that it was only 149 pages and priced at over $50 for a paperback. I did some searching.
The publisher was Alphascript Publishing. Putting the names of the editors of the Queen book into bookfinder.com returned hundreds of titles, all published on demand and all at enormous cost.
And what do you get for your money? Amazingly the Alphascript Publishing website will tell you.
Don’t spend money for reprinted Wikipedia articles. If you see a combination of rare title and high price back off, take out your ten-foot-pole and examine it carefully. It may be a trap.
Other “publishers” do this as well, but this is the biggest one I’ve seen. I understand it’s not legally a scam, anymore than reprinting free government documents and charging you for them is a scam. People have been doing that for years. I don’t really care about calling them bad names, though. I’m free to tell you that IMO you should never give them a penny of your money - in any currency. Never, ever. Beware.
Frankly, just the short page count and the high cost for a newly available PB would have put me on alert. If I’m paying fifty bucks for a new book, I expect a new hardback, with extras like leather binding or art touches on the cover or something.
To learn that they are reprinting Wiki articles, and charging for this, boggles me.
If I had a spare $50 to blow, I would get one of these books just to figure it out.
For example, the book on this page is 144 pages long. Maybe every link on that page gets printed as well, and each link on those pages too.
Reading through the first page of print of the book shown in the Wiki link, I’ve found three or four grammatical errors on the first three paragraphs. Lovely.
I wondered about that too, but then I realized that they reprint every Wiki page that has anything to do with the topic, not just the one main entry. So for Ellery Queen, there is the main page, the tv shows page, the magazine page, the movies pages, pages about the individual books, and everything and anything else that could reasonably bulk it out.
That’s because, according to their Wiki page and their FAQ, they neither proofread nor edit the material, assuming the work is already of a high standard.
This has become a fairly common scam and I don’t believe it’s limited to just this company. I’ve seen multiple listings for books that are simply lyrics of popular songs printed out.
They probably do have all that content, but they also publish another two Ellery Queen related titles, one about the tv series and one about the magazine. So some pages probably appear in all three books they list!
But the publisher info for the tv series does mention Wiki as the source:
“High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Ellery Queen is an American television mystery series that ran for one season from 1975 to 1976 on NBC. It starred Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen, and David Wayne as his father, Inspector Richard Queen. One of several television adaptations of the Ellery Queen mystery novels (see also The Adventures of Ellery Queen), the series was created by the writing and producing team of Richard Levinson and William Link, who also created such mystery fare as Mannix, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote.”
And they stretch that to 70 pages for $37.00
(info from Ingram’s (the distributor) site, so I can’t link to it)
Books LLC offer similarly high-priced article compilations, which are also Wiki based. They even say “Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online”!
