I love books about linguistics and I've been learning Hebrew and Arabic for a while now. So I was happy to see this title on Amazon: Semitic Linguistics: Proto-Semitic Language, Semitic Root, Status Constructus, Broken Plural, Nonconcatenative Morphology, Emphatic Consonant.
Scam LLC
I ordered it without too much thought. When the shipment arrived I was a bit surprised at how thin the book was, which costs almost 10 quid. I took it with me on a trip without looking into it. In the train I opened the book and I felt had. It's fucking scam.
Apparently Books LLC is taking articles from Wikipedia and putting them up for sale on Amazon. Perfectly legal, thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. But it's still a fucking rip-off. Especially since they can come up with tons of new "books" every day like this.
The problem lies with Amazon
The main problem here lies with Amazon. I really don't understand why they accept selling this book. It screws up their name and it will be a while before I order books again there without deep scrutiny of the books - which makes it less likely I'll buy there.
Today I shipped back the book, which costs me 6 euros, but it's worth every euro if it makes Amazon consider taking Books LLC crap off of their online store... And apart from writing it off with this blog post I left some more reviews for books from Books LLC on Amazon.
Meanwhile it would be good if the Wikimedia Foundation dives into this and starts selling printed Wikipedia articles themselves. Or if some online printing service would step up and provide this service. I would be happy to buy these since it would look much better, and the money would go to support Wikipedia. And if it turns out to be a genuine success we won't have to look at Jimbo next year whenever we look up something on Wikipedia ;)