Artificial unintelligence

[cimorene]

I keep getting notification alerts on my phone - "New from GK Chesterton!" - when someone reuploads a GK Chesterton work to Google Books, which is rather frequent given that he's long dead.

Although I guess that's why the production time is so low, since they can just reformat it and slap a cover on with no concern for copyright.

Going by the quality of the cover designs, they can't be putting enough effort into the formatting to merit much profit.

Comments

[cimorene]

A single line of code could check that the author was alive! Not to mention how many "complete works" are out there, so they must have exactly the SAME combination of re-published stuff.

I got a notification for a new Arthur Conan Doyle once, too.

[msilverstar]

It would have to be more than a single line, Tolkien's heirs are regularly publishing and other authors' works are coming out in new editions, which are legit.

But they could run a plagiarism checker, which would barf these out as duplicates

[cimorene]

Oh, good point!