Philip M. Parker

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Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) is an American economist and academic, and currently the INSEAD Chaired Professor of Management Science at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template that is filled with data from databases and Internet searches.

Early life

Parker is dyslexic. He received undergraduate degrees in finance and economics. He received a Ph.D. in business economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has master's degrees in finance and banking from Aix-Marseille University and managerial economics from Wharton.

Work

He was a professor of economics and business at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to INSEAD, where he has been a professor of marketing since 1988. His work focuses primarily on macroeconomics.

Automatically generated books

Most of Parker's automatically generated books target niche markets (the "long tail" concept). Examples include:

• Books series on medical subjects published by Icon Health Publications and coauthored with James N. Parker. The Official Patient's Sourcebook series deals with classic diseases like spinal stenosis or autoimmune hepatitis. The 3-in-1 Medical Reference series deals with general medical topics like hemoglobin.
• A series on the future demand for certain products in some areas of the world, mainly consisting of tables and graphs, published by his company Icon Group International, Inc. One book, The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, won the 2008 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.
• A series of cross-language crossword puzzle books, e.g., Webster's English to Italian Crossword Puzzles: Level 1, and Thesauri, e.g., Webster's Quechua – English Thesaurus Dictionary, published by Icon Group International, Inc. Some of these titles raised concerns with linguists who claimed inaccuracies and ownership/citation rights in specific languages covered in these volumes. Parker removed the concerned titles from print stating that he had not known that anyone claimed intellectual property rights over languages.
• A series of quotation collections subtitled Webster's Quotations, Facts, and Phrases, each volume assembling quotations that feature a specific English word. Excerpts are drawn from public domain literary sources and reference works, and from Wikipedia articles (identified as "WP" after a quotation). The English professor Nicholas Royle noted that Veering: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases contained quotations unrelated to the word "veering" or using "Veer" only as a proper name; he described the book as "quite bizarre" and "absurdly expensive."

All books are self-published paperbacks. Ninety-five percent of the ordered books are sent out electronically; the rest are printed on demand. Parker plans to extend the programs to produce romance novels.

See also

• Books LLC
• Large language model
• Racter
• VDM Publishing

References

Notes

Further reading

• Abrahams, Marc (January 29, 2008). "Speed Writing – Take a Leaf Out of Philip M Parker's Book", The Guardian. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
• Abrahams, Marc (February 4, 2008). "Automatic Writing – Further Volumes of Philip M Parker". The Guardian. Retrieved February 24, 2012.

External links

• Faculty page at INSEAD
• Video of Phil Parker explaining his software
• Philip M. Parker's poetry site written using computer algorithms
• Philip M. Parker's anagram site with anagrams found in natural language strings