I have recently discovered that a Print On Demand (POD) ‘publisher’ in the US is offering a 26-page ‘book’ called Novels by Elsie J. Oxenham: Abbey Connectors, Abbey Series, Oxenham Non-Connectors (Study Guide) (ISBN: 1156856264) for about $15.00 or the local currency equivalent. This appears to be directly copied from four articles on Wikipedia that are largely my work, and that I put on there for free internet use. When I ‘signed up’ to the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), that Wikipedia writers agree to abide by, I did not envisage my altruism stretching so far as other people making a profit from it.
It seems that this firm, Books LLC, offer other POD ‘Study Guides’ – which one is forced to conclude may themselves be ‘lifted’ from Wikipedia or other free sources. They do in fact state in the EJO book itself that it is taken from Wikipedia, but at no point until you have paid can you see that. (I downloaded one for evidence - it seemed worth paying the £6.40 pdf download fee in case I had a claim on them - I don't of course, but it's still a scam.) I also checked a Novels of Amy Tan (Study Guide) title they are offering, and again, the sample text they show of that is lifted straight from the Wikipedia article on The Joy Luck Club.
So along with all the other reasons to be wary of POD titles, comes the fact that people may be being inveigled into parting with their cash for something that is freely available on line.

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to be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e.cummings
http://stitchwords.blogspot.co.uk

There was a similar scam recently where a guy in the US self-published copies of some fanfic written (by a British woman) on an Enid Blyton forum and advertised them on Amazon.

We all - writers and would-be buyers - need to be very wary of stuff like this going on at the moment. Thanks for the warning on this one, Ruth.

Just read your letter about this in the Telegraph, Ruth. Did you write to all the papers?

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"All books are either drums or swords. You can cut, or you can drug with words." (Amy Lowell)

No, just the D Tel - was quite surprised they printed it!

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to be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e.cummings
http://stitchwords.blogspot.co.uk