200,000 books and writing more

Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing.

Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea ($24.95 and 168 pages long); Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers ($28.95 for 126 pages); and The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India ($495 for 144 pages).

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Parker, who holds some provocative—and apparently profitable—ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows. And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms.

Perusing a work like the outlook for bathmat sales in India, a reader would be hard pressed to find an actual sentence that was “written” by the computer. If you were to open a book, you would find a title page, a detailed table of contents, and many, many pages of graphics with introductory boilerplate that is adjusted for the content and genre.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”