New RISC OS book? No a RIP OFF!

New RISC OS book?

49 recent sales with Surhone in the title, so it appears there is a market ‘Printed Wikipedia’, but £29.75!

Take it, print it, sell it.
Classic.

yup it’s someone that is doing this “practice” with many things actually, included amiga, atari, linux etc…

You guys have only just noticed?

This crap turns up from time to time on Amazon. Hell, it even says in the description that it’s from Wikipedia. I guess some chancers are just hoping to make a few quid off of clueless people. Like pretty much every other scam out there.

[hmm – wouldn’t this rubbish need to have an ISBN?]

Mx Surhone has a long and illustrious career in editing, and is cognisant of topics as dissimilar as particle physics and beekeeping. There is a paean of praise to this paragon of wordology in the New York Times, no less.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html

Interesting. A student of Mohamed El Naschie perhaps? I wonder how many sockpuppets and aliases he has. The Wikipedia article on El Naschie is astonishingly restrained.

I blame Nicholas Bourbaki (the nonexistent mathematician) for starting this sort of thing. But at least Bourbaki’s books were good value. The students’ maths society at Sussex University once invited Bourbaki to come and give a lecture. He politely refused, “à cause de ma grande timidité”.

Ironically Wikipedia has an entry for the publisher
Now I wonder if someone… does a printed copy of Wikipedia entries of ‘publishing scams’ including that entry!

I was amused by the
Recommended Age Range: 0-12 months
but I doubt we will gain any new users.

May I recommend At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien. Its protagonist, a university student in Dublin who is supposed to be studying, spends all his time in bed, writing a novel about one Dermot Trellis, who spends all his time in bed writing about a host of characters, including one John Furriskey, who was born aged twenty five. Trellis (who traces the seasonal changes of the year by the inactivity or virulence of his pimples) finds himself brought to court, accused of mistreating his characters who feel aggrieved with their creator.

I am surprised that this kind of recursion is not seen more frequently in the age of the internet, when it is not clear whether authors and their characters are real or fictitious. Mr Surhone might be just a nom de plume for a gang of confidence tricksters, itself an invention of a Russian agency, which claims that it is part of a CIA-sponsored training exercise partly funded by Surhone.

Nature of this comment: whimsical, cynical, unnecessary.

Mr Surhone might be just a nom de plume for a gang of confidence tricksters, itself an invention of a Russian agency, which claims that it is part of a CIA-sponsored training exercise partly funded by Surhone.

It’s all OK, whatever you say – the slander/libel case against you will be led by Rudy Giuliani :)

characters who feel aggrieved with their creator

There is a long history to this type of novel. One such strand starts with the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Luigi Pirandello, travels via the Goon Show episode “Six Charlies in Search of an Author”, ending up at Spike Milligan’s book “Puckoon” (much of this last work is taken up with the lead character squabbling with the author…)

May I recommend At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.

[Off topic] As a bonus, the book contains the shortest mate sequence from the opening position in chess – just two (regular) moves! – described in a really epic way. Actually, I would recommend all of Flann O’Briens books, The Third Policeman to begin with.

Actually, I would recommend all of Flann O’Brien’s books, The Third Policeman to begin with.

++:) The Third Policeman , paradoxically (no spoiler), contains the most convincing description of a blissfull state of happiness that I have ever read.