P-O-D equals B-A-D?
I’m not against print-on-demand technologies because I think it offers some writers a viable new venue and doesn’t necessarily have to be vanity printing. But, as with most technology that deals with human affairs like creativity, there are some drawbacks. The London Times has pointed out one Philip M Parker who has created over 200, 000 titles (albeit mostly statistic books from what I can see) using print on demand technology. But the worst part is that, by his own admission, automation produced a large part of his works. And he’s planning to move into romance novels and poetry. that’s what freaks me out. No matter how formulaic either genre can be, in the most juvenile hands, it is still something human. The idea of automated poetry makes my skin crawl. Take a look at this article that hints at a possible disturbing future:
Robots wrote my bestseller
Philip M. Parker has written over 200,000 books, and all of them have turned a profit. How does he do it? With the magic of computers
Try to think of the most prolific author you know and your mind will probably turn to one of those writers of thick adventure paperbacks who cannot be prevented, even by death, from producing a new action-packed blockbuster every holiday season.
Even the most productive of them would be outstripped, though, by Philip M. Parker. Through his own print-on-demand imprint Icon Group International he currently has 200,000 books currently available on Amazon.com. By contrast that shy creature Anonymous has a paltry 12,133 titles listed over a much longer career.
Parker’s creative fecundity can be ascribed, at least in part, to a reliance on computer programmes to generate a substantial part of his literary output. As he explains in an interview with the New York Times, he sees himself as “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands” in the same way that Henry Ford pioneered the mass-production of the automobile. “Every single step we could think of” he says “we automated.”
Sales are rarely in excess of a few hundred copies per title but print-on-demand means that Parker has no great warehouse of dead inventory waiting for a reader. The books exist only on computer disk until an order has been placed.
Most of the titles so far are textbooks generated by scripts searching the Internet for information on the subject, but plans are already in hand for a series of romance novels and volumes of poetry.
Given the growing scope of the Google Book Search project, which reads books and uploads them to the Internet, it’s now possible to foresee a literary future in which human intervention is no longer required.
We’ve got to use the force for good, not evil, guys.
the specter of not needing humans to produce bad writing is scary.
Reading this at first I thought it was a joke. Only in this absurd era.
With any new technology, people are going to have to use trial and error before figuring out how to use it right. I’m sure POD will revolutionize the way books are distributed, but having a computer write books is just insane. People who bought these books were generally disappointed by the lack of quality content they contained, so it’s not like he’s retaining reader loyalty.
As an author my feelings on this matter should be apparent. It takes a lot to write a book. An important ingredient is heart, something a computer does not have. I think this idea of computers writing books is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. I still hate the idea of e-books and now some money hungry scam artist wants to replace flesh and blood authors with a machine. What a joke.