Philip M. Parker says he uses computers to automate the difficult or boring work that is required to publish many guidebooks on a variety of topics.

Philip M. Parker’s book topics are as disparate as bathmats in India and skin disorders.

By NOAM COHEN

It’s not easy to write a book, but Philip M. Parker seems to have overcome all of the obstacles.
Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.”
Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007- 2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6- Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).
But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also a professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject - broad or obscure - and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a variety of genres, many of them about 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.
If this sounds like cheating to the average person, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative, and apparently profitable, ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.
And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
Perusing a work like the outlook for bathmat sales in India, a reader would be hard pressed to find an actual sentence that was “written” by the computer. If you were to open a book, you would find a title page, a detailed table of contents, and many pages of graphics with introductory text that is adjusted for the content and genre.
While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004.
Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: “The book is more of a template for ‘generic health researching’ than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away.”
When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating.”
Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have spent $24.95 for it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who are not skilled navigators of the Internet who have found these guides useful.
It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. He said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”
He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”
Artificial intelligence researchers say computers are far from being what the general public would consider authors.
“There is a continuous spectrum, also known as a slippery slope, between a program that automatically typesets a telephone directory and a program that generates English texts at the level of variety you would expect from a typical human English speaker,” said Chung-chieh Shan, an assistant professor in the computer science department of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
“The former program is easy to write, the latter program is very difficult; in fact, the holy grail of linguistics.”
Mr. Parker has lately taken to lighter fare intended to educate. He said he had invested in word-based video games and animated game shows that will teach English to non-English speakers. YouTube has many examples of these games, which have computer-generated scripts.
A low-tech version of those games are the thousands of crossword puzzle books Mr. Parker has made in about 20 languages. The clues are in a foreign language and the answers are in English. The computer designs the puzzles and ensures that the words become harder as one progresses.
As part of his love of words, and dictionaries in all languages, Mr. Parker said he has taken to having his computers create poems .
Of course, one of the difficulties of generating a hundred thousand poems is stepping back and assessing their quality.
“Do you think one of them is Shakespeare-” he was asked.
“No,” he said. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”