Writing a book

For most of us, including your faithfully, writing a book is regarded as a long laborious exercise. Having been brought up in a family where academics was de rigeur, book writing was regarded as the pinnacle of all achievements. Watching my father write books on a rickety old portable typewriter, followed by manual editing on the margins of carefully typed sheets was a fascinating part of my growing up.
Things changed, and then came the electronic typewriter – something that my father always dreamed of purchasing but could never do so. Finally the computer made the electronic typewriter redundant. Surprisingly though, my father’s book writing days ended the same time when the computer replaced our potable typewriter in our study.
The process of book writing is delightfully described in an article in the NYT.

It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And then there is the table of contents. If you want the book to be categorized, either by a bookseller or a library, it has to be assigned a unique numerical code, like an ISBN, for International Standard Book Number. There have to be proper margins. Finally, there’s the back cover.
Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing.

Considering the fact that computers make book writing so much easier. It is not just editing and typing where computers aid in book writing, as Philip Parker reveals in this article in the New York Times. Parker has generated 200,000 books, and interestingly the NYT uses the word “generated” rather than “written”. The most published writer on the planet uses computer algorithms from available sources to compile a book.

An editor picks the years to be covered, but the computer picks the optimum model for extrapolating sales in various countries, and in alphabetical order produces a chart for each country. “It will then open a Word document and export the information into Word just like a real author would out of their minds, so to speak, or spreadsheets,” he says.

Parker describes how it is created in this video on YouTube
And now Parker is delving into creating acrostic poems, with the difficult portion being to assess the quality of these poems.