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This article formerly said, "Parker estimates that production of a book costs him 12 pence." In support of that statement, it cited a Guardian article. The relevant sentence in the Guardian reads, "Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book" (note "write", not "produce"). A New York Times article says, "he [Parker] points out that once he has trained the computer to take data about past sales and make complex calculations to project future sales, each new book costs him about 12 cents in electricity." Since Parker lives in the U.S., he would be much more likely to express his expenses in U.S. currency than in British pence.
The actual cost of producing a physical book by the print-on-demand method falls roughly in the $1-to-$5 range. A reasonable estimate of the electricity rates where Parker lives is $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. A desktop computer and monitor together might consume somewhere around 200 watts. So for 12 cents, he could run his computer for about two and a half hours.
Going on this evidence, I think Parker's actual quote probably meant that it costs him 12 cents (U.S.) to run his computer long enough to create the content of a new book.
Additional comment on Parker's production costs can be found in his interview on the O'Reilly Tools of Change site. The tacit understanding there is that the 12 cents is the cost of writing a new book in a genre that has already been programmed (at much greater expense).
Gwil ( talk) 19:46, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
Does he have any connection to or recognition from Merriam–Webster or Webster's Dictionary? It seems not. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 21:29, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
An editor removed one of my citations saying the Icon books often use Wikipedia as source material and therefore cannot be used. I don't doubt that this is true, but if it is, it's not mentioned in the article. Can anyone shed any more light on this? BashBrannigan ( talk) 17:50, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
There's no source listed for the number of listed books on Amazon. Currently, if you search his name without quotes, 110,000 results are returned, but most have nothing to do with him. If you search his name with quotes, only 26 results appear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atkinson 291 ( talk • contribs) 13:45, 26 September 2011 (UTC)