Herself's Webtools

Many of us who’ve been online a while have created pdf versions of our websites. This was more common in the nineties through the early zeros. I wrote an ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ pdf. It is dated now but still available on my AI website. It was an easy way to get information out to people.  Also it was easier to let people download and redistribute pdfs, than it was for them to keep coming to your website.  Internet access wasn’t available everywhere.  Bandwidth was costly and you didn’t have Adsense to defray the cost.

A month or so ago I received an email that went some thing like this:

Since you are already having the experience of writing books
and we have seen your book on AI which was written quite long ago,
and I feel that this is the time to please revise the the book and we
are sure that you are having good and sufficient material to really
write a good stuff and we are also very eager to publish the at the
earliest possible time. this book is a target oriented text book for
Engineering students.

Herewith we request you to please write the text book
according to the syllabus enclosed ,we can publish and sell all over
the Globe.

Please find the given below syllabus of the local
University , please prepare the book according to the syllabus

we will be happy to offer you a one time royalty
payment or 15% royalty on the sold number of copies in
the fiscal year.

It set off all my scam alarms but I couldn’t figure out the scam. The pdf was and is freely available to anyone who wants it. It has a Creative Commons License, allowing you to do anything but commercially distribute it. What’s the scam?

Further digging led me here:
Lulu Forums: Suspicious Request from an Indian Publisher.

I’m still not sure what the gig is? Are they printing up books that are found online for sale? Are they nabbing copyrights and selling the copyrights to legit publishers? I don’t know? It may be that they are a legit publisher who is just starting out and everything here is above board. There is just not enough information.

I noticed that today the publisher has a website up Ikon Books but there is little information on the site so far.

I took the advice in the Lulu forum having little else available. Google and other search engines turn up little so far on Ikon books or offers of this sort. If you know anything leave a note or a link below for others. We’re curious and betting we’re not the only ones who are.