He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)

April 14, 2008 | Source: New York Times

Philip M. Parker, professor of management science at Insead, a business school, has “written” more than 200,000 books, using intelligent computer algorithms to gather and organize information from the Internet and compose it into formulaic structured text–a.k.a. “books.”

Aided by 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, a print-on-demand book costs him about 12 cents of electricity to create, allowing him to break even after the first sale.