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XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 4:50 pm
by DanB
Hi,
Noticed a few new XMOS books on Amazon... These do not seem official (and indeed the front cover suggests they're ripped from a (?) wiki page).
Any ideas?
Dan.
EDIT: They make reference to XCore rather than XMOS... So are they ripping from our XCore wiki pages?
Re: XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 4:59 pm
by octal
I think it's simply a swindle !!!
arround £25 for 88 up to 100 pages paperback book, with content collected from wikipedia.
XMOS should report abuse to Amazon to ban these resellers!
Re: XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 5:02 pm
by DanB
octal wrote:
XMOS should report abuse to Amazon to ban these resellers!
Precisely my thought. Especially as the information may be old/invalid, and hence this could represent XMOS/XCore badly. Anything wiki based, by its nature, should be referenced from the latest versions.
Re: XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 3:39 pm
by jason
This is news to me. I shall look in to this and pass it on to anyone involved in documentation at XMOS. Thanks guys!
Re: XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 4:02 pm
by DanB
A quick Google of the name on the cover of all of the books, Betascript, leads here:
http://www.betascript-publishing.com/
Looks suspicious from the start, but more interestingly their "Portfolio" ( ;) ) links to an Amazon page containing all of "their" publications, here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=s ... Submit.y=0
227, 556 results... Hmm... Something is odd already!
The website (Contact Us) lists the address to be in Mauritius.
Looking at the Whois record for the domain (
http://whois.domaintools.com/betascript-publishing.com) shows the registrant (and admin) to be VDM Verlag (who are also listed on the Betascript "Contact Us" page). Note that here, however, a German address is given.
None the less, trying VDM for size...
http://www.vdm-publishing.com/
All looks, as you'd imagine, very similar, though here the "Contact Us" address seems correct (matches the Whois record). Cannot comment on the "Portfolio", but it does not seem to be the same as Betascript's... Though I've not gone through their 227, 556 results to verify ;).
Very interesting... Hopefully it'll be easy to get to the bottom of.
Re: XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 4:19 pm
by jason
On the plus side I have discovered what Publisher is in German. I have got to get verlag in to a sentence in the near future.
Re: XMOS Books on Amazon
Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 4:31 pm
by DanB
jason wrote:On the plus side I have discovered what Publisher is in German. I have got to get verlag in to a sentence in the near future.
;)
Seems that Alphascript also exist and are related to VDM. Pretty imaginative naming convention :P .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing
Google shows a few other blogs/forums discussing the work (or lack of) of VDM.