http://guaka.org/tag/semitic-languages en http://guaka.org/2010/11/25/books-llc-scam-amazon <div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-2 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">tag: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/tag/scam">scam</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-1"><a href="/tag/amazon">amazon</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-2"><a href="/tag/books-llc">books llc</a></li><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-3"><a href="/tag/semitic-languages">semitic languages</a></li></ul></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>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: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Semitic-Linguistics-Proto-Semitic-Constructus-Nonconcatenative/dp/115770347X/ref=cm_cr_wr_img">Semitic Linguistics: Proto-Semitic Language, Semitic Root, Status Constructus, Broken Plural, Nonconcatenative Morphology, Emphatic Consonant</a>.</p> <h2>Scam LLC</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>Apparently <strong>Books LLC</strong> 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.</p> <h2>The problem lies with Amazon</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Meanwhile it would be good if the Wikimedia Foundation dives into this and starts selling printed Wikipedia articles themselves. Or if some <a href="http://onlineprintingservices.info/">online printing service</a> 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 ;)</p> <h2>Other scams</h2> <p><a href="https://hucksters.net/person/rasmus-refer/">This guy</a> is a total scammer. Did some work for him, never paid me. He's on a continuous path of scamming and these days he's probably doing the same thing as an "artist".</p> </div></div></div> Thu, 25 Nov 2010 16:50:52 +0000 Guaka 545 at http://guaka.org