HiTeX Press: A spam factory for AI-generated books

21 points by SoapDog 15 hours ago on lobsters | 6 comments

dmbaturin | 15 hours ago

Reminds me if AlphaPress/BetaPress that were mostly writing their books by rehashing Wikipedia pages. When I was working for Vyatta, we saw a BetaPress book about it, which seemed very surprising because Vyatta was a young project and it seemed unlikely that a publisher would invest any effort into a book about it (back when human effort was mandatory).

They were selling the book for something close to $100 and didn't provide any free samples, so I have absolutely no idea how bad it was. It was probably better than the outright slop from the post, though.

gcupc | 8 hours ago

It amuses me that one of the nonexistent authors is named "Richard Johnson". But maybe I'm just 12.

Student | 8 hours ago

Twist: they probably don’t care if people buy this. It could be a money laundering exercise. Some of these books are over $100.

ndegruchy | 11 hours ago

I nearly fell for this company when browsing books. I was looking for something on BBEdit, just as a curiosity, and came across their book on it. However, it had no reviews, was released in 2025 and I didn't recognize the publisher. After doing a quick search, I found this post and others that point out that it's just an LLM farm.

For 8€/book, I'm surprised they make any money with this scam. Just printing, logistics, storage would cost more one would think

[OP] SoapDog | 11 hours ago

They actually don't cause you can use a print-on-demand service so they just take a cut of the sale and handle all printing and logistics.