3 Responses to “repackaging information”

1. Camilla Says:
   
   April 17th, 2007 at 7:06 am

   Thanks for the references, repackaged though they are.

   
   
2. Amanda Brooks Says:
   
   April 18th, 2007 at 9:34 am

   Camilla,

   You’re welcome!

   XX

   PS: Re-read this post and realized I made a big error in the first paragraph. There can never be enough proofreading.

   
   
3. Hobbyist Says:
   
   October 14th, 2010 at 4:34 pm

   You’re not the only one. Years before the internet and easy research on books and authors, I bought a few non-fiction books that were very suspicious: ambitious or controversial subject, large font, no discernable style, little original content (but many, many quotations).
   I eventually realized that some authors were nothing but mercenaries hired by publishers to do quick and nasty jobs on hot topics (the industry phrase escapes me right now). Those books read like digests of previous works, so while they could fool the unsuspecting, the vacuity of the work was blatant to anyone familiar with the subject.

   Repackaging is another type of recycling, and I’ve been taken that way too on a few impulse buys. Only once you open the book do you realize that you’ve already read it, or most of it.

   I’m sure that publishing houses can defend the practice by saying that they’re just tailoring the product to various markets, but I think they’re being dishonest and trying to “maximize” their investment by selling it over and over.