Hi all,
3 books have appeared on amazon.co.uk by Victor Laplace, there are no reviews and no ”look inside”
Computational Physics in Fortran
Differential equations in Fortran
Finite element analysis in Fortran
All published by Golden dawn engineering
Does anyone know if these are real?
A book called “Computation Physics :: Fortran” is a well-known book written in 1985 by Steven Koonin. All the titles are very similar to other publications. All seem to have appeared suddenly and there is no posts or papers or other published articles by an author of that name that I know of. I wouldn’t know how to not assume it is AI generated. But if he can put out three books in a matter of a few weeks he must be an astonishingly prolific guy; so odd he has no other publications 
From the covers of these 3 books, I am fairly confident these are shit generated by so-called AI.
I checked and bought books very often on Amazon, and since about 1-2 years ago, a bunch of this kind of shit appear on Amazon. Some of them you can preview on Amazon and it is clear that the content is generated by LLMs. I think this is a new kind of scam.
I have been watching this phenomenon for a while. Hopefully Amazon will do something to deal with it.
A common feature seems to be a lack of a bio on the author and a picture of the author. Pretty rare to not describe the authors’ credentials or experience when the subject matter is technical.
I even wonder if the ISBN numbers next to the bar code on the back covers are faked.
I wonder if I should buy one, I can always return it if, as suspected, no human being was involved in their production.
One check plausible for books relevant to science is a search by ISBN on worldcat.org. This meta catalog is backed by many large (national) libraries (keyword legal deposit), as well as ones by universities, parliaments, corporations, etc. Coverage on libraries and their holdings is incomplete, more like an opt-in – however, for the first one, Computational Physics in Fortran claimed to be published by December 2024, it does not yield any record.
Or isbnsearch.org but here the result only is a Sorry, there are no active offers for this book.
I do not know who maintains the book list under “learn” on our companion web site, but we might want to warn them these books should not be included until they have been verified to be genuine.
And I have a horrible feeling this problem is only going to get worse.
Thanks for the useful comments everyone
I am reminded of a colleague at a conference in Paris, with his limited French, a particularly mathematical paper quickly lost him, so he switched to the simultaneous English translation. He was even more confused when he kept hearing about “the changing market for these equations”. So he went back to the native French, where he heard “la transformation de Laplace”.
I wonder if Victor Laplace is claiming so sort of win over Amazon as a market place?
Within the public repository on GitHub, path data/learning.yml defines the site in question. You fork the repository, edit, and file a pull request; volunteers review it/provide hints where necessary in addition to contributing on the repository’s landing page if able. A link to a recognized publisher/complementary check on worldcat likely helps to keep the list in good shape.
I doubt very much if a refund would ever be returned.