7 replies to this topic

[Servant of the Lord]

I just found this while googling.

 

Someone created a book called "Avadon: The Black Fortress", with a bunch of keywords to steal the game's traffic, to intentionally mislead consumers to buy their product.

The book sounds like it's just a print-on-demand of copy+pasted Wikipedia articles related to the actual Avadon game. They copied a bunch of articles, it's only 88 pages long, and they're charging $42 dollars for it, seemingly to intentionally scam Jeff Vogel's customers.

 

Apparently this gentleman has done this alot:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/nethanel-willy

(226 pages, with 30 results a page? That's 6780 scam books that Barnes and Nobles is letting this guy sell)

 

I'm not sure there's much Jeff Vogel can do about it, since technically this scam is not violating the copyright by just talking about the game, but I sent him an email anyway incase Jeff was unaware of it.

I guess he could (if he wanted to bother with it at all) argue that the scam is intentionally deceiving customers, but the scammer partially covers his back by saying "Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online." and hoping individuals don't read it.

 

Avadon (the real game), what parts of it I played (I got about 20 hours in before I stopped), was very fun.

 

Just thought I'd vent a little by posting this.

[slicer4ever]

just clicking around on a few books, it plainly states that the majority(if not entire) book is comprised from free sources, so their really shouldn't be anyone that "falls" for this scam.

[Servant of the Lord]

Well, certainly no one smart will fall for the scam, but it clearly is an intentional deception and if the guy made so many of them, he must get at least a few purchases per book or he wouldn't continue doing it. 

 

It's really not a big deal, and plenty of junk like this exists in the world, but it just rubbed me the wrong way.  

[slicer4ever]

i hear you mate, it's defiantly morally questionable that he's allowed to get away with it(and the prices placed on the books are kindof insane for stuff that's free content).

[L. Spiro]

You can contact the publisher, International Book Marketing Service Ltd (Jeff Vogel especially can do this) in protest.
It would hold more weight if Jeff Vogel contacted them and he could likely have them do something about it or make them hesitant to work with him in the future.
Petitions might also make them hesitant to work with him in the future.


L. Spiro

[TheChubu]

hahaha, some of those are pretty funny. ie, the "Jazz" one.

[Rakilonn]

Awesome ! A definition of a word for only $44.00 !
You can't hesitate.

Someone must really be a d****** to earn money shamelessly like that. ( and has too much free time )

If there will be a petition I will sign it gladly.

Edited by Rakilonn, 08 February 2013 - 01:39 PM.

[wintertime]

Such a thing is sadly nothing new. Some months ago I read there is actually a whole network of related scam book publisher companies that basically let a computer pick a random phrase from the internet, collect wikipedia articles containing similar words and put them roughly in a book form, put a random graphic and a random editor name on the cover(sometimes same name for a few thousand books so its impossible to do for a real person) and then offer print on demand of that crappy thing on amazon (not sure if it was on amazon) for an outrageous price and that whole thing they do tenthousandfold.