Anyone know about the book on Robert Kuntz?

Virel · Jun 8, 2011

I'm sure most of us have heard of Robert Kuntz from the early days of D&D and Piped Piper Publishing. He was Gary Gygax co-DM also.

Anyone know details about the new book with his name on it?

darjr · Jun 8, 2011

I've never heard of it before. Count me in as very curious and wanting to know more.

Living Legend · Jun 8, 2011

Man, my wife's little brother had quite a laugh at your thread title.

Virel · Jun 8, 2011

Living Legend said:
Man, my wife's little brother had quite a laugh at your thread title.

I do what I have to to get folks to check out the thread.

Melan · Jun 8, 2011

I may be interested in a scholarly book on early D&D, but...
$66 for the trade paperback? Really?
"Note: Content for this publication has been taken from one or more articles found on the WIKIPEDIA website."? Really?

A company variously calling itself Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing is taking articles from Wikipedia and publishing them as books. It would appear that the act of doing that is legal, but from the outside, many of the books give the appearance of having been put together by some automated system, because the titles (and presumably contents) seem to be comprised of a Wikipedia page forming the starting point for the book and then a load of other Wikipedia pages which are linked-to from that page. It’s all very strange.

Really really?

Dire Bare · Jun 8, 2011

It's a scam. This "publishing" company "publishes" a large number of books which are simply hard-copy print-outs of Wikipedia content, for exorbitant prices. I'd really like to meet the folks who have actually purchased any of these. How these douchebags stay in business I can't figure.

Melan · Jun 8, 2011

There is more in the Wikipedia article on VDM Publishing. Apparently, they hope their books are bought accidentally by clueless or hasty libraries.

In a way, it is pretty amazing, though. If you told someone in 1990 that in The Future, there would be an immense, free repository of knowledge available to almost everyone, and machines would be automatically assembling and publishing randomly created books from this content, they would probably respond with something like "Wasn't that on Star Trek?"

Just think about that.