talkmagic.co.uk

So I went to Amazon.co.uk to buy a new copy of RRTCM (I gave my old copy to a young relative for Christmas, he wants to learn card magic) and I found that searching for "RRTCM" actually finds the book! I tried "EATCT" too but it didn't find anything, I did decide that I ought to get a copy though and searched for the full name (expert at the card table) and further down the list I found these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sleight-Hand-In ... 124323668X" target="_blank" target="_blank
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Card-Magic-Incl ... 1243244763" target="_blank" target="_blank

According to the synopsis:
"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 Card magic."

I can't help but pronounce Hephaestus as half-assed-us but this whole thing seems very odd to me. They're harvesting wikipedia and binding it in books. Other than the pointlessness aspect (if it's on wikipedia, you can go view it there yourself for free, wikipedia will be updated and this won't, and seriously, wikipedia? Other than obscure facts to win bets in the pub, who ever learned anything from wikipedia?) it's sort of questionable on moral grounds, because presumably someone is profiting from idiots buying these books?

Does anyone know how long this has been going on?

-Stacy

And each one is over £14! Seems like a very cynical way to re-wrap existing, possibly free or public domain, information and sell it at a high-ish price. Rest assured they won't be on my Christmas Wish List!

I am sure I had heard of this before. I would have assumed it was from this site, but maybe not.
A little search shows that they started putting their books into retail on November 4th 2011.
I came across a website called superbookshop, which when searched for Hephaestus returns 192033 books, which seem to all have the standard book covering of those above.

There are people that have fallen into the trap and bought these books, but it is stated in their description what it actually is.

Article - Hephaestus Books and Deceptive Titles Nov 4th, 2011

It seems that this company isn't selling books, but books of discussion about books, their content being scraped from public domain sources. A complete rip-off, in other words. So, if you buy what you think is a novel, you actually get a discussion about the novel you thought you were buying, formatted by scripts from Wiki entries you could have looked up for free!