POD sleaze
A different version of print-on-demand publication sleaze: Ronald Cohn and Jesse Russel are listed as authors of more than 200,000 books in the Amazon and Indigo catalogues. What these "books" actually consist of is print-on-demand trade paperbacks of Wikipedia articles. You order a book, they print off the W'pedia article and bind it, and it only costs around C$25. But many of the catalogue entries don't include things like the number of pages, which in most cases will be very small, and none of them actually say in the listing that they're derived from W'pedia. If you look at one of the covers, carefully, you can see an emblem which reads: "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!" The covers are auto-generated from the article titles, and even that process is sloppy -- they don't "sanitize" the text for HTML, so you get burps like the cover of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, missing the ampersand.
This is probably all legal, per Wikipedia's terms of use. Wikipedia even makes it easy to generate a book from an article; they've got a system set up to do the printing, binding, and shipping... at a much lower cost than what these bozos are charging. But it's grossly unfair to the buyer to sell such "books" to people without making it clear what they're getting.
Most print-on-demand books cannot be returned after purchase. In most cases, that's a fair limitation. When the product is as misleading as this... well, I don't know if the no-returns policy applies to these books, but I'd be surprised if it didn't.
This is probably all legal, per Wikipedia's terms of use. Wikipedia even makes it easy to generate a book from an article; they've got a system set up to do the printing, binding, and shipping... at a much lower cost than what these bozos are charging. But it's grossly unfair to the buyer to sell such "books" to people without making it clear what they're getting.
Most print-on-demand books cannot be returned after purchase. In most cases, that's a fair limitation. When the product is as misleading as this... well, I don't know if the no-returns policy applies to these books, but I'd be surprised if it didn't.