Professor shows off system that makes books on demand

ExtremeTech talks about a new inventon from Philip M. Parker to algorithmically compile data into book form. Parker works as a marketing professor at INSEAD and created an advanced automatic content generation system that can nearly fully automatically create reference books, crosswords, reports and educational books. Parker's systems has been used to put over 800,000 books for sale on Amazon, and can also be used to generate videos and games. Full details at ExtremeTech.

This video below features Parker himself explaining how the process works, and why it’s useful. Because of his specialty in marketing, it’s easy to assume that these books are designed for spam-like purposes, but it does also have benefits to traditional writing outside of the amazing speed. Specifically, he points out that in the case of very rare diseases, it’s unlikely that any books would be written in the first place. Especially when you’re looking at statistics and data, having a computer compile and find potentially significant data is very useful. While the books won’t be particularly creative, they absolutely do have a place.

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Humans just don’t have the ability to translate content to that many languages in a time and cost effective manner. Computers can knock that out during a long lunch. Using this system, it is possible to spread information to places that used to be impossible to reach. Computers won’t be replacing humans for writing the great American novel or entertaining the masses on TV, but it is obvious that computers will be an increasing fixture in the analysis and translation of content. This is a perfect complement to human creativity — not something for creatives, researchers, or consumers to fear.