It seems that the 21st Century Digital Revolution, as it may someday be called, is getting bigger and bigger with each passing month. As is well known, financial losses faced by the movie industry and the music industry are increasing monthly as bootlegs made possible by digital versions proliferate. New digital models that could not have been predicted a decade ago are supplanting traditional business models so quickly that both of these industries are in very real danger of collapsing altogether.

Now, however, another, more unlikely victim may be added to the list: The publishing industry.

The New York Times recently ran a story profiling Philip Parker, an entrepreneur who has invented a way for books to be written by a computer algorithm. Or, rather, a way for books to be “compiled”. He doesn’t simply distribute existing books online; he’s created a business where the books themselves are written not by people but by a computer program.

From the article:

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

The technique isn’t perfected yet; and the end result at this point does leave something to be desired:

While nothing announces that Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating.” Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”

He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”

Should authors be worried? Probably not, at least not yet. There’s a wide gap between what a computer can compile and the nuanced hand of a skilled artist. Still, this news is a bit unsettling to those employed in the creative arts. And, taking the music industry as an example, it doesn’t seem well advised to underestimate this sort of development. It’s the kind of trend that could as easily become a dead end as an overnight sensation. Either way, it’s worth consideration.

Click here for the original story. More on the Digital Revolution in the coming days. Stay tuned.