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Believe it or not, the First Lady of mystery and the Big Kahuna had something in common-they were both innovators in the sport of surfing! Agatha Christie, as it turns out, was one of the first Britons to stand up on a surfboard, and she sharpened her wave riding skills in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii as early as 1922. Oh what a sight she must have been braving the waves of Waikiki!
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A literary-technical tour de force, and the man behind it
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Philip M. Parker is the world’s fastest book author, and given that he has been at it only for about five years and already has more than 85,000 books to his name, he is likely the most prolific.
Philip M. Parker is also the most wide-ranging of authors. The phrase “shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings” is not the half a percent of it. He has authored some 188 books related to shoes, ten about ships, 219 books about wax, six about sour red cabbage pickles, and six about royal jelly supplements.
To begin somewhere, let’s note that Philip M. Parker is the author of the book The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in the United States. This book is 677 pages long, sells for $495 and is described by the publisher as a “study [that] covers the latent demand outlook for bathroom toilet brushes and holders across the states and cities of the United States.”
Philip M. Parker titles include the following (this is a hastily chosen few, so they are probably not his most colorful):
Avocados: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography, and Annotated Research Guide
Webster’s English to Romanian Crossword Puzzles: Level 2
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Golf Bags in India
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Chinese Prawn Crackers in Japan
The 2002 Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Cataract Surgery
The 2007 Report on Wood Toilet Seats: World Market Segmentation by City
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen Asparagus in India
Professor Philip M. Parker, author of more than 300,000 books. Photo courtesy of INSEAD. |
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Philip M. Parker is the INSEAD Chair Professor of Management Science at INSEAD, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France.
Professor Parker is no dilettante. When he turns to a new subject, he seizes and shakes it till several books, or several hundred, emerge. About the outlook for bathroom toilet brushes and holders, Professor Parker has authored at least six books. There is his The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Japan, and also The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Greater China, and also The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in India, and also The 2007 Report on Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders: World Market Segmentation by City.
Amazon.com offers (on the day I am writing this) 85,761 books authored by Philip M. Parker. Professor Parker himself says the total is well over 200,000.
How is this all possible? How does one man do so much?
Professor Parker created the secret to his own success. He invented a machine that writes books. He says it takes about twenty minutes to write one.
There arises the question, “Why?” The patent (U.S. #7266767), which describes a “method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing” and which Professor Parker wrote in the traditional, pre-Parker, non-computerized way, answers this question.
The answer appears on page 16. Professor Parker quotes a 1999 complaint by the magazine The Economist that publishing “has continued essentially unchanged since Gutenberg. Letters are still written, books bound, newspapers mostly printed and distributed much as they ever were.”
“Therefore,” says Professor Parker in this patent document, “there is a need for a method and apparatus for authoring, marketing and/or distributing title materials automatically by a computer.” He explains that “Further, there is a need for an automated system that eliminates or substantially reduces the costs associated with human labor, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors, and marketing personnel.”
We asked Professor Parker how he manages this Herculean output. He replied:
I started back in 1992 with the idea. Had a lot of failures, then succeeded in 2000 when I filed the patent. I have amassed huge linguistics databases (I am an avid dictionary collector, since I was 18), and have a background in mathematics, and computer programming, so I have approached this from a management science perspective. Everything is organized by genre, and within genre by topic, and within topic by sub-topic, etc., for all languages. It is a matter of organization.
The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book — a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products, or maybe a patient’s guide to medical maladies. Then one hooks the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information or maladies. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.
Professor Parker estimates that it costs him about 23 cents to write a new book, with perhaps not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA or a physician might produce.
Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy, typically via an online automated bookseller. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.
Professor Parker’s patent document includes this schematic overview of the automatic authoring process. |
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Among Professor Parker’s best-selling books (as ranked by Amazon.co.uk) one finds surprises.
His fifth-best seller is Webster’s Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.
No. 6: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Ferrous Metal Waste and Scrap Excluding Waste and Scrap of Cast Iron and Alloy Steel in United Kingdom.
No. 21: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Seaweeds and Other Algae in France.
No. 25: Oculocutaneous Albinism—A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients, and Genome Researchers.
No. 44: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Fresh or Chilled Whole Fish in Lithuania.
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Chinese Prawn Crackers in Japan, mentioned above, is Professor Parker’s 66th-best seller.
This graphic overview shows
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In the 93rd spot comes The 2007 Report on Cat Food: World Market Segmentation by City.
Rounding out the list, at number 100, is The 2007-2012 Outlook for Edible Tallow and Stearin Made in Slaughtering Plants in Greater China.
Professor Parker is also enthusiastic about books authored the old-fashioned way. He has already written three of them.
The books are in a way just the beginning. Professor Parker also plans to use the same method to produce video programs—thousands upon thousands of them—and video games. He tells us:
If I am lucky, this will allow the creation of content (educational material, books, software, etc.) for languages (or for subject areas) that simply do not have enough speakers, or economies that can support traditional publishing or content creation. For example, in health care, some diseases have fewer than 1,000 people who get the disease worldwide per year. Of those, only 1 or 2 might want a reference book. Using this method, the break even for a book is 1 copy, with no inventory cost (all books are either printed on demand, or distributed via ebook). Some languages have only 100,000 speakers, so no “Hollywood” producer would envisage creating programming to such a narrow audience, etc. This approach allows for this level of production (I am starting with an educational game show, and 3D personal computer games).
This flowchart, part of the patent document, discloses
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For a vivid introduction to Professor Parker and some of his works, see the video he has put online.
For a few more of Professor Parker’s memorable books, see the article “May We Recommend: Parker Titles,” elsewhere in this issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. Also elsewhere in this issue is “Dr. Parker’s Latent Library and the Death of the Author,” a discussion of the philosophical implications of Professor Parker’s accomplishments.
(Thanks to Peter Carboni for bringing the first toilet brush outlook book to our attention, and to Chris McManus for alerting us to the several hundred medical books.)
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The article above is from the March/April 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
The book Geekspeak: A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable, Making Sense of the Insensible, and Solving the Unsolvable by Dr. Graham Tattersall poses, and answers, those questions that no one else seems to address -until now. Can you tell how heavy a bus is by looking at it? What size wings does an angel need to fly? What are the best words to use in a personal ad? How much could sea levels rise?
Geekspeak is an essential tool that will help you exercise your brain and solve the unsolvable, make you sound intelligent so you can impress your friends, and enable you to better understand the fascinating world in which we live in ways never thought possible before.
This is one of those books that makes being a geek fun (which geeks already knew) and makes real-world math accessible to those who might avoid it otherwise. To give you a taste of Geekspeak, we have obtained permission to reprint a chapter for your perusal. Fly Wheels looks at measuring biological power in mechanical terms in order to compare the two.
(L) Neil Gaiman by Leigh Gallagher (R) Jules Verne by Ted McKeever
Steven Gettis of Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!!! website has been collecting artists’ interpretation of their favorite literary figure/author/character since 1998. So far he’s got over 300 drawings done (wow!). I particularly like the drawings of Neil Gaiman and Jules Verne above.
Not to be missed: Link
Michel Cuhaci received a flawed copy of the book A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equation, so he left a one-star review on Amazon. The author, Dan Fleisch responded and promised to send a replacement overnight. At the time, Fleisch did not realize how hard that would be on Christmas Eve!
“I called (parcel services), and getting it delivered was out of the question,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘OK, maybe I can find a bookstore that had it in stock.’ ”
No luck — most bookstores had closed early.
“It got to be late afternoon. I couldn’t find anyway to get it to him.”
His next thought — he’d drive to Canada and deliver the $26 book himself.
“I looked at my iPhone and there was this massive blob (snowstorm) over the whole Northeast,” he said.
Fleisch ended up flying from Ohio to Ottawa to deliver the book on Christmas Day, ending up back home after midnight. His journey reads like a comedy of errors.
Last week Cuhaci went back to Amazon and added a new comment about the book and its author.
“But I did not change the rating,” he said. “I want people to look at my comment and see what a dedicated author he is.”
Link to story. Link to Amazon review. -via reddit
The following is a guest blog by Kelsey Timmerman of Travelin Light | Blog
During my research for my book Where
am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that
Make Our Clothes
Arifa holding her daughter Sadia
Arifa
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Quote: “Their father was a crook, and the government doesn’t
take care of my children. It’s not like the USA or the UK.”
Arifa is a single mother. She lives on the sixth floor of a crumbling apartment building in Dhaka with her daughter Sadia, 4, and her son Abir, 11. She has another son, Arman, 18, who went to Saudi Arabia to work. He sends half of his money home to help his mom and siblings Arifa works at a nearby garment factory where she earns $24/month. A trip through the market is enough to show that Arifa is well respected by all and feared by merchants, who don’t dare bargain with her.
Nari (left) with roommates
Nari
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “The workers at beauty salons make less than garment
workers, but I will be an owner and make more.”
Nari works at a factory that makes blue jeans. She shares an 8’ X 12’ apartment with seven other girls. Four of the girls sleep on a bamboo bed and the other four sleep on the concrete floor. Nari irons jeans. It’s a job that she had to pay a $50 bribe – a month’s wage – to get. Fifty dollars is probably enough for one person in Cambodia to live on, but Nari, like many of the garment workers in Cambodia, supports her family of six. She is attending beauty school and hopes to open her own salon someday. She doesn’t like bowling.
Ai
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “I miss working and talking in the rice fields. At the
factory, we aren’t allowed to talk. The bosses want us to work as
quickly as possible.”
Ai shares an apartment with Nari and works at the same factory. She is a checker, looking for flaws. Eighty-five people have a hand in sewing together a single pair of blue jeans, and Ai makes sure that no one screwed up. Like many garment workers, she lives far from her home village and rarely visits; a six-day workweek won’t allow it. Ai doesn’t have a contract with the factory, which means she doesn’t have the same rights as other workers. She can be fired for absolutely no reason. She supports six people on her wage of $55/month. She owns a Tweety Bird shirt, but has no idea who Tweety Bird is.
Zhu Chun (left), Dewan (right)
Dewan and Zhu Chun
Guangzhou, China
Quote by Zhu Chun: “One thing is for sure. I don’t want
(my son) to come here to work in the factory. I just want him to study,
because people like us who don’t have knowledge have to work very
hard.”
Dewan and Zhu Chun moved from their village 600-miles away to Guangzhou to get a job at a factory making shoes. They haven’t seen their 13 year-old-son in three years. The original plan was to work a few years to pay off the home they built in their village, but Dewan’s mother got sick and died. Now they have a house and expensive medical bills to pay off. A few years have become a few more. The law limits their workweek to 44 hours, but they often work more than a hundred. Neither one of them has eaten cheese.
Debbie holding the author's favorite shorts
Debbie
Perry, New York
Quote: “They would have to push me out the door to get me to leave.”
Debbie’s job working for Champion was supposed to be a filler between college and whatever she decided to do next. Twenty-eight years later she is still working at the factory, which is no longer owned by Champion. In 2002 Champion moved the factory’s work and hundreds of jobs to Mexico. Lucky for Debbie the community of Perry pulled together and a new company, American Classic Outfitters, was born from the ashes of Champion. You’ve seen Debbie’s and ACO’s work. They make uniforms for 16 of the 30 NBA teams, all of the WNBA, 73 colleges, and 3 NFL teams.
Kelsey
Timmerman is the author of Where
am I Wearing
Ninety-seven percent of our clothes are made overseas. Yet globalization makes it difficult to know much about the origin of the products we buy—beyond the standard "Made in" label. So journalist and blogger Kelsey Timmerman decided to visit each of the countries and factories where his five favorite items of clothing were made and meet the workers. He knew the basics of globalized labor—the forces, processes, economics, and politics at work. But what was lost among all those facts and numbers was an understanding of the lives, personalities, hopes, and dreams of the people who made his clothes.
In Bangladesh, he went undercover as an under-wear buyer, witnessed the child labor industry in action, and spent the day with a single mother who was forced to send her eldest son to Saudi Arabia to help support her family. In Cambodia, he learned the difference between those who wear Levi's and those who make them. In China, he saw the costs of globalization and the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle.
Kelsey's blog is full of neat tidbits from the book. Don't miss the Underwear Wall of Fame and his informal survey of where people's T-shirts were made.
Oh, one more thing: his wife Annie just gave birth to the couple's first child, Harper Willow Timmerman, on January 6, 2009. She's very cute! (Congrats Kelsey!)
Are you an author and would like your books promoted on Neatorama? Let's talk about a possible guest blog post just like this one!
