Parker is a professor at INSEAD Business School in France. In his spare time, he employs seven programmers and has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information and turn the results into books. In addition to his dictionaries, Parker has ‘written’ more than 110,000 books, which surely makes him the most prolific author in the world. It must be difficult to maintain creativity when one is busy writing so much; clearly, his inspiration reached an all-time low with The 2007–2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats, and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India (2006), which is for sale at $495. People actually buy these books. One person wrote a review saying: ‘If you are good at the internet, this book is useless.’

Parker is not alone in making his fortune from parasitic dictionaries and spam books. It is estimated that there are 365,000 spam books for sale on Amazon. One German company, VDM Publishing, and its imprints Alphascript and Betascript specialise in taking Wikipedia articles, attributing their authorship to three editors (Fredric Miller, Agnes Vandome, and John McBrewster), wrapping them in glossy covers, selling them on Amazon, and printing on demand. They have more than 92,000 spam books listed on Amazon on topics as diverse as Badami Cave Temples ($48) and Woody Allen ($50). Each cover has a brightly coloured sticker that says ‘High Quality Content by Wikipedia Articles!’ as though it were a special selling point.

Who actually buys these spam books? Surely no thinking person. Well actually, it seems that Australian universities have fallen victim. Libraries at the University of Melbourne have purchased nine titles, Monash six, and the University of Queensland five, ranging from Vitamin C (2009) to Maya Civilization (2009) and Abalone (2009). A few titles prove popular with several Australian universities: Italian Invasion of Albania (2010) was bought by both Sydney University and La Trobe; and a book on KPMG (yes, the accounting firm) was purchased by the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Sydney (both Parramatta and Campbelltown campuses). Some of the purchases are truly bizarre: it is not immediately apparent why the Australian Catholic University library (Brisbane campus) would have required Rumble in the Jungle (2010), 129 pages on the famous heavyweight boxing fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

At a time when funding at Australian universities is being cut almost weekly, it would be worth investigating exactly who ordered the purchase of these titles. Is it possible that the publishers in Germany are submitting purchase requests for spam books to libraries around the world?

The publication of spam books and parasitic dictionaries is increasing daily, and it is only a matter of time before they outnumber mainstream published books, in much the same way that the millions of videos on YouTube outnumber the 500 films produced by Hollywood each year. There are many implications for authors and publishers, one of which is how much quality content we should offer gratis online. All this serves as a warning, or at least as a caution, against too readily providing free online access to scholarly research. After all, if we were to make the next edition of the Australian Oxford Dictionary available free online, what is to stop Philip Parker or the editors at Alphascript Publishing from taking it, wrapping it in a glossy cover, and selling it on Amazon as their own work?