Strange e-books at lulu.com

March 6, 2010 2:10 PM

Odd e-books at Lulu.com - what's the deal?

While browsing through lulu.com, I keep seeing published e-books that all have these things in common:

Odd titles, always in lower case.
Seemingly random cover art.
Price near $150.00
Preview shows text in a foreign language.

This is an example.

I'm curious - anyone know what these pdf books are all about?

posted by davebush to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

It seems reasonable to assume it's a scam: if anyone's dumb enough to push the purchase button, the scammer gets $150. They use non-English documents to make it less obvious on cursory review that the contents are arbitrary filler.
posted by majick at 2:33 PM on March 6, 2010

Response by poster: It seems reasonable to assume it's a scam

Possibly, but why wouldn't they at least make an effort to present the illusion of value, such as using a title like "Lottery Secrets Revealed"?
posted by davebush at 2:41 PM on March 6, 2010

Are the preview texts all in Vietnamese? I managed to find another one, and it was also in Vietnamese. I wonder whether that has any bearing on the question...
posted by pammeke at 2:49 PM on March 6, 2010

My guess is money laundering, maybe they buy these with stolen credit cards or something. I don't know why they don't put in more effort, though.
posted by delmoi at 3:33 PM on March 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm thinking money laundering.
posted by chelseagirl at 5:47 PM on March 6, 2010

I was going to say what delmoi said. This is a simple way of converting dirty money into clean money. It won't look odd on an invoice and an especially smart accountant may be able to write these purchases off against tax, as a bonus.

On preview: oh, and Chelseagirl.

Nuts, I'm always late.
posted by Sutekh at 9:13 PM on March 6, 2010