These are just more recent versions of an old scam, computer-generated self-published works, with content stolen from other sources, and presented at new material. They’re not even LLM-generated, except maybe for a few sentences. The bulk of the content was written by others, people who have no idea their work is being appropriated to make a quick buck.

Robin, the worthy creator of 8-Bit Show and Tell on Youtube, has done a 54-minute examination of some of these books, all on the topic of programming Commodore 64s, surely a growth market in 2025!

The five books Robin found, and bought to show off on his channel, are laughably fake. The computers pictured on the cover are the furthermost things from Commodore 64 machines, and the middle initial of their supposed authors consistently puts the period before the letter! They practically flaunt how easy it is to create AI slop, how little effort and money they must expend to get obviously fake books up, to sell to the maybe dozen people, tops, in the world today seeking info on how to program a forty-year-old 8-bit computer. (The books are copyright 2023, so at that time it merely a 38-year-old computer.)

The third book’s introduction in particular is great. All the books offer “Funny helpful tips” on the first page of content, but this one tells us to “incorporate activities that promote lymphatic drainage.” See! Look!

The stolen text, down to swiping the very images from the original, seems to come from this book from 2020, Beginner’s Step-by-Step THEC64 Coding Course by Rich Stals, a book written to support one of those recent-vintage, all-in-one platform revivals, the THEC64 Maxi.

Almost as infuriating as Amazon selling the same book under five different titles and with content pirates from a different book, the hoops they made Robin jump through to return them for a refund were a terrible experience, limiting him to picking an option to return them from a list, none of them being “this is an illegal copy of a different book.” Depending on the reason he picked, but not in any logical sense, he was offered a free copy of the same book in recompense. Awful.

Also on the subject of Commodore 64s…. I am still working feverishly on my Loadstar explorer menu program, which seeks to make leafing through the 22-year history of that C64 magazine much easier than having to individually open disks into an emulator and seek them out through the disks’ original menus. I hope to have something to share on that count very soon! Set Side B is a general (if esoteric) video gaming blog, we aren’t going to go all-out Commie for Commodore, but you might see a marked uptick in C64 info for awhile.

rodneylives