Tom_Garrett (Tom Garrett) says…

If you are looking on the internet for a book and come across one printed by Hephaestus Books, you need to know something before you buy it.

I was looking for a book on an environmental disaster that I had read about many years ago. I already knew a lot about it and wanted a book with more depth than I could get by just researching online. So I went to Amazon and put in a search. One of the books I found had this odd sounding description:

“Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Environmental disasters in the United States.”

You know what that means? It means that someone has gone to Wiki, selected (that's what “curated” means) articles, and pasted them into an electronic copy of a book. If you order one they'll be happy to print one for you and charge you for it.

But instead of getting the kind of in-depth information you expect from a book, you get nothing but the same old skimming over the surface you get by reading Wiki, which is good, but only a starter.

So I could go to Wiki, extract the biographies of—say—twenty early Hollywood directors and producers, put them together in a book—without adding or subtracting a single word!—stick a title on it like “Twenty Men Who Created Hollywood,” and charge you for the book.

Why pay for something you can get free?

What are they going to think of next?