Is a book a book?

On Monday morning I was reading the news paper. I turned to the Business section and found an interesting article. Now I don’t usually read this section - I typically just skim to make sure that, when someone says “Delta and Northwest are proposing a merger,” I can nod like I know what they are talking about. But this article caught my eye, and made me think of a discussion we had a few weeks ago about what constituted a “book.” The article was at the bottom of the first page, and titled “He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)”. If you haven’t read it, you can find it either at:

Cohen, Noam. (2008, April 14). He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work. New York Times, p. C1.

or here

For those of you who don’t have time to read it, the article in a nutshell:

Philip M. Parker (the Eli Lilly professor in innovation, business, and society at Insead) has generated more than 200,000 books. Among them are books such as Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers ($28.95), The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea ($24.95), and the famed 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India ($495).

So, what is Mr. Parker’s secret? He uses computer algorithms to “collect publically available information on a subject … and turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.” The computer’s compile the information, create a title page, table of contents, and “many, many pages of graphics with introductory boilerplate that is adjusted for the content and genre.”

Asked if he thought this was useful, Mr. Parker conceded “‘If you are good at the Internet, [these] book[s] are useless,’” but he added that “there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful.”

You will all be happy to know that Parker also works on crossword puzzles, poetry, and scripts for animated game shows, and is in the beginning stages of producing romance novels – he notes on this subject that “‘there are only so many body parts.’”

So a few weeks ago, we talked about whether a book was still a book if it was not in the traditional bound book format. I wanted to ask the opposite question, is an Internet search a book so long as it looks like a book?

Just food for thought.