Amazon.com offers 85,888 books written by Philip M. Parker, but Parker himself claims over 200,000.
A professor of management science, Parker has found the ultimate answer to writer's block--a computer program that churns out a book in 20 minutes and never misses a deadline.
The products are no monkeys-tapping-the-keys gibberish but specialized volumes that sell for high prices. Amazon will send you "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Lemon-Flavored Bottled Water in Japan" for $495 plus shipping.
Other books cover such subjects as toilet brushes, Chinese prawns and rotary pumps with designed pressure of 100 psi or less. One of his best-sellers is "Webster's Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1."
Parker produces his outsized oeuvre with a machine he invented that, after being fed the formula for writing a genre of book, scours a huge database full of information about a subject and uses the recipe to select data that it then writes and formats into book form.
His next breakthrough may be a blog-writing machine that swallows the news from thousands of sources and regurgitates it to support any opinion that is programmed into it. But, on second thought, that would be redundant.
Friday, February 08, 2008
The Automated Author
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