March 27, 2009
The future of publishing is here today!
The oddest thing about the newly announced winner of Bookseller magazine’s annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year is not its title, The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, but rather that its author, Professor Philip M Parker of the French business school Insead, has produced more than 200,000 books,
thanks to his invention – and patenting – of a machine which writes books, creating them from internet and database searches in order to eliminate or substantially reduce “the costs associated with human labour, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors and marketing personnel”.
I think the graphic artist–eliminating part of the machine may need a bit of work, since if the competition had been based on covers rather than titles, I feel certain that Fromage Frais, for all its charm, would have lost out to either Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring or Curbside Consultation of the Colon, which were merely shortlisted.
More: “Oddest Book Title prize goes to treatise on fromage frais” by Alison Flood, Guardian, March 27, 2009
2 Comments
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sc said,
April 1, 2009 at 10:59 am
For the Guardian, the future is now:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology
India said,
April 1, 2009 at 11:23 am
Yes, yes, we all know about that already; we saw it on Twitter.
What you may not know, however, is that Tor Books and Tor.com have chosen to disambiguate themselves:
FSM be praised; that was getting really confusing.