[undecidabot]

I apologize for going off topic, but if the author is reading this (perhaps I should email him instead), please be informed that your work has been plagiarized on Amazon, by a book called "Python Programming: A Step By Step Guide From Beginner To Expert" [1]. Read the first few pages of the print book's "Look inside" and you'll see a word for word copy of the book.

Not only did they plagiarize your work, but they did a really poor job of it too. The print is full of formatting issues. The code blocks are not properly indented, which is not only poor style but also broken given that python is white-space sensitive. And bizarrely enough the letter "q" is continuously in bold throughout the whole book. You can easily verify this from the pictures by the reviewers. I don't actually own a copy of the book myself.

To make matters worse (or better?), they only decided to include the first four chapters, ending at "Conditional Execution". Yes, the plagiarized book claims to be a guide "from beginner to expert", yet it didn't reach the chapters on loops and functions!

If you read the reviews, you'll quickly notice that it's full of fake five-star reviews with very vague sentences, some of which don't even make sense. You'll also (now) see a lot of real one-star review, which means that quite a number of people have fallen for this scam.

Surprisingly, one of the fake reviewers even got in Amazon's top 100 reviewer list. Check the profile of "Kip Krenz" [2], who is currently at rank #53. Somehow he managed to review two to four books on a near daily basis for maybe a year or more, mostly five-stars (the rest are four-stars) and full of generic sentences. The books reviewed are most likely "fake" as well. They often fall under one of the following: a beginner book, a self-help book, a cookbook, a trading book, or a book on one of the latest fads.

This book is unfortunately just one of the many fake books (not the jazzy kind) that have proliferated on Amazon. If you look at the other recommendations, you'll probably find another one of these books (Python seems to be one of those profitable topics).

A common technique used by these books is to put themselves under some niche category in order to get a high rank. For example, this book categorized itself under "Microsoft C & C++ Windows Programming" [3], and is currently at #9 there (it used to be #1, but thankfully the real reviews probably dragged it down). For a more peculiar example of this, take a look at what's #1 under "Windows XP Guides" [4].

Sorry for going on a tangent with such a long wall of text. I spent a night "investigating" this whole thing a few weeks ago, and after seeing this post, thought that it would be best to spread awareness of the issue here.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Beginner-Intermedi...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGXMOOP4UKWV...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/3967

[4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134002011

[halterman]

Original author here. Someone else discovered this and notified me about three weeks ago. Amazon has a site for reporting infringement, so I submitted my claim of ownership. I received an immediate automated response promising a follow up, but I have yet to hear anything more.

In the book's front matter I grant permission for anyone to use the book freely and to make as many copies as they like as long as the original copyright notice remains intact. It started out as my small way of helping my students who are facing escalating higher education costs. Over the years, I've received feedback from other instructors at both the university and high school level who appreciate having this option available for their students.

[JBlue42]

Thanks for writing this book. As a someone who has had some starts and stops with Python I look forward to giving this oen a shot.

It might be worth calling up Amazon customer service. They are usually very helpful and might be able to route you to the correct person.

[gojomo]

I appreciate your research here. I've clicked the "report abuse" option for a few of the sketchy reviews on Amazon, and submitted my own review pointing to your post here, and the original PDF. Perhaps that will prompt Amazon review, or at least save a few potential buyers.

[zapzupnz]

Don't apologise for this; your dissection, even if only a comment, was a tremendously enjoyable read. Well done for putting in the effort to research this!

[userbinator]

Apparently someone thought it valuable enough to "pirate", so you can see it yourself here, unfortunately minus the bolded 'q' and bad paper quality:

https://bookflare.org/python-programming-a-step-by-step-guid...

It's perplexing why someone would copy only the first 4 chapters --- and do it poorly --- but I suppose it's enough to sell; maybe they're not as rational as me, since if I were to plagiarize and sell books, a search/replace of the author's name would've been sufficient. No doubt whoever is doing this is expending more effort for an inferior product.