Author of 200,000 books or something like that

So my brother facebook'd this article:

He wrote 200,000 books (but computers did some of the work)

The deal is, the author, Philip M Parker, has created computer algorithm's to search the internet and compile relevant material into books. Then he publishes the books on demand. At 200,000 books this likely makes him the most published author ever.

Now perhaps to call this man an "author" is a bit of a misnomer. His efforts have generated the text for 200,000 books - he himself didn't really write all the text. On the other hand the individual sentences are not really computer generated either. The putting together of all the sentences is however.

"Perusing a work like the outlook for bathmat sales in India, a reader would be hard-pressed to find an actual sentence that was "written" by the computer. If you were to open a book, you would find a title page, a detailed table of contents, and many, many pages of graphics with introductory boilerplate that is adjusted for the content and genre."

The quality of his books are another thing.

While nothing announces that Parker's books are computer-generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004.

Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: "The book is more of a template for 'generic health researching' than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search-and-replace away."

When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Pascoe wrote back, "I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating."

Yep. AI won't solve everything yet. And likely Parker's poetry won't be much competition to the real poets.