…and you shouldn’t.

Amazon is now listing a book with the title of Charles M. Schulz and the ungainly subtitle of Cartoonist, Comic strip, Peanuts, Secular humanism, Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Fort Campbell, Combat Infantryman Badge, Art Instruction Schools, She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown. Forty-nine bucks. 76 pages. What the heck is this thing?

The secret to this lies in that little green bullet at the bottom of the cover. It reads “High Quality CONTENT by WIKIPEDIA articles!” Ignoring, for the moment, that articles are not authors, we can quickly surmise what this book is. It’s obviously the Wikipedia article on Schulz… plus a collection of other Wikipedia articles that are linked to in his Wikipedia article. Presumably, they have an automated farm that are generating these books as print-on-demand items, ready to be generated. You can, of course, go read this all for free over at Wikipedia. And if you really wanted a book with this particular content, you can have Wikipedia generate it for you; price, under $8, plus shipping. (You could, of course, choose for yourself a much more logical set of content.)

This doesn’t count as a book to me until they print a copy. Let’s not give them reason to do that.

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