Talk:Philip M. Parker

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Philip M. Parker article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.

If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page.

Biography: Arts and Entertainment / Science and Academia

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the arts and entertainment work group (assessed as Low-importance).
	This article is supported by the science and academia work group.

Books: Reference works

	Books portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate in the project, please visit its page, where you can join the project and discuss matters related to book articles. To use this banner, please refer to the documentation. To improve this article, please refer to the relevant guideline for the type of work.BooksWikipedia:WikiProject BooksTemplate:WikiProject BooksBook articles
	This article is supported by the Reference works task force.

Economics Low‑importance

	Business and economics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Economics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Economics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EconomicsWikipedia:WikiProject EconomicsTemplate:WikiProject EconomicsEconomics articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

France Low‑importance

	France portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject France, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.FranceWikipedia:WikiProject FranceTemplate:WikiProject FranceFrance articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Wikipedia Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Wikipedia, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's encyclopedic coverage of itself. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page. Please remember to avoid self-references and maintain a neutral point of view, even on topics relating to Wikipedia.WikipediaWikipedia:WikiProject WikipediaTemplate:WikiProject WikipediaWikipedia articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

University of Pennsylvania

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject University of Pennsylvania, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of University of Pennsylvania on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.University of PennsylvaniaWikipedia:WikiProject University of PennsylvaniaTemplate:WikiProject University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of Pennsylvania articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

It is requested that an image or photograph of Philip M. Parker be included in this article to improve its quality. Please replace this template with a more specific media request template where possible.
The Free Image Search Tool or Openverse Creative Commons Search may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites.

Upload

Deleted misleading cost figure

This article formerly said, "Parker estimates that production of a book costs him 12 pence." In support of that statement, it cited a Guardian article. The relevant sentence in the Guardian reads, "Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book" (note "write", not "produce"). A New York Times article says, "he [Parker] points out that once he has trained the computer to take data about past sales and make complex calculations to project future sales, each new book costs him about 12 cents in electricity." Since Parker lives in the U.S., he would be much more likely to express his expenses in U.S. currency than in British pence.

The actual cost of producing a physical book by the print-on-demand method falls roughly in the $1-to-$5 range. A reasonable estimate of the electricity rates where Parker lives is $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. A desktop computer and monitor together might consume somewhere around 200 watts. So for 12 cents, he could run his computer for about two and a half hours.

Going on this evidence, I think Parker's actual quote probably meant that it costs him 12 cents (U.S.) to run his computer long enough to create the content of a new book.

Additional comment on Parker's production costs can be found in his interview on the O'Reilly Tools of Change site. The tacit understanding there is that the 12 cents is the cost of writing a new book in a genre that has already been programmed (at much greater expense).

Gwil (talk) 19:46, 7 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Connection to Webster's?

Does he have any connection to or recognition from Merriam–Webster or Webster's Dictionary? It seems not. --Apoc2400 (talk) 21:29, 27 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Icon books cannot be cited?

An editor removed one of my citations saying the Icon books often use Wikipedia as source material and therefore cannot be used. I don't doubt that this is true, but if it is, it's not mentioned in the article. Can anyone shed any more light on this? BashBrannigan (talk) 17:50, 26 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This would probably have been a book from the series called Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases. (I've added a couple of relevant sentences to the article.) One might cite a conventionally edited quotation collection (like The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) to show that a particular saying is well known, but the quotations themselves shouldn't be used as a source of factual information. The Icon books are worse because they aren't even human-edited: they're automated compilations of isolated sentences from online sources which happen to feature an arbitrary English word (including synonyms), so they're about as cite-worthy as a Google search results page. Unfortunately, Icon books turn up often in Google Books searches, which makes them attractive to editors in a hurry to find sources. EALacey (talk) 14:59, 27 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Especially to newbies like me that never heard of this guy before. :)

I just saw the mistake I did when you removed my references on a couple of articles. I had no idea who this guy was before but I'll keep his name in the back of my mind now. I didn't even think it was possible to create books in such an industrial way like this. NeoGenPT (talk) 23:44, 21 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"107,000 books on Amazon" number source?

There's no source listed for the number of listed books on Amazon. Currently, if you search his name without quotes, 110,000 results are returned, but most have nothing to do with him. If you search his name with quotes, only 26 results appear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atkinson 291 (talk • contribs) 13:45, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]