There's a hilarious book about Lewis Carroll's relationship with his publishers. He just told them how much he was going to get from the sales of his books and how much they would get. He also got them to run all sorts of errands for him, like buying him theatre tickets (specifying exactly where he wanted to sit). I don't suppose anyone would get away with that now.

Just checked Amazon again, and they are still listing 20,617 of those "books"......

Down to 20,587 now. At this rate, they'll all be gone by Christmas. Of 2013.

Down to less than 13,000 now. I'm impressed.

Here's what gets my goat, though.

Just today, in response to a very similar publishing rip-off scam, Ryan Kaldari thinks he's cavalry coming to the rescue of the WMF brand by "notifying the WMF legal department".

Heads up, Ryan! Back in October 2009, I alerted WMF legal eagle Mike Godwin to the fact that VDM Publishing's printing the front-cover tagline, "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!" was likely an unauthorized use of the Wikipedia trade name in commerce.

Guess what Godwin's response to me was?


And later...


Note that almost exactly one year later, Godwin would be out of his job at the Wikimedia Foundation.

I wonder if ol' Geoff Brigham will handle this particular publishing corruption a little smarter than Mike Godwin did?

In the Kohs-centric universe, everything that happens is caused by somebody's response or non-response to Kohs. He is the fixed center of the turning world.

Eh what's your point? You don't like Kohs or something?

I think Kohs is kind of awe-inspiring.

Hey whilst you are here - It looks like the WMF got a $500K bung from Google for SOPA, did you get any of it, for past services?

Clearly your awe threshold is low, Mr. Godwin. Which explains your willingness to kiss the feet of that creepy guy Jimbo.

You realize, I hope, that the only things that separate you from Mr. Kohs are that you're on the opposite side, and you happen to have a meme law named after you, right?

I suppose that if I use my 'favourite' word to describe Greggy-Weggy the I'd end up upping my deleted message total?

Why? He's a big boy, he can handle a few vulgar epithets... particularly given that your own username nearly qualifies as one to begin with!

I think people are taking this whole "deletion spree" thing much too seriously. And as for the posts that actually get deleted, just try to think of them as "keyboarding practice."

Some of my best material ended up in dev/nul

dev/nul is usually where the best material is found, if you think about it.

And no offense to Somey and CL, but: