The Minecraft scam NO ONE is talking about!

[Music] a couple of weeks ago i received some discord messages congratulating me on becoming a published author now i consider myself to be a busy person and i do a lot of things with my time but publishing books is not one of them intrigued i clicked on the link they sent it brought me to an amazon page for a book and little did i know what i just discovered the book was entitled the tragic story of the witch minecraft deep dive perfect for minecrafters kids and adults top builder ideas guidebook graphic novels and to my shock the author was my true name jeffrey miner covington ok not really but i do know that mr covington did not write this book for those of you who have been watching my channel for a while you may recognize part of the title as one of my deep dive videos specifically in my video about the minecraft witch it's one of my more popular videos having been viewed over 1.6 million times among that number was our friend jeffrey if we look inside the book we notice that besides simply using the title of my video jeffrey has also used the voiceover and written it out as text furthermore there are several stills from the video unfortunately there are only a few pages available in the preview i couldn't read the whole book yet for a mere 999 us dollars i could buy a paperback version of the full book for my reading pleasure so i did something bad something very very bad something which you should not do i bought the book yes i know this book is a clear and blatant violation of my copyright and i'm ashamed that i gave this person any money but i bought it for a good reason i wanted to see if i could glean some more clues about the nature of this book and learn who was stealing my content so brashly a few days after i placed my order the book arrived [Music] [Applause] this tome is an unpleasant specimen it's a paperback with a matte finish the cover is extremely ugly it's an incoherent mess reminiscent of the regurgitations of a sickly cow a large minecraft logo imposes its will at the top whoever designed this was clearly not very good at photoshop as their attempts to cut out the minecraft logo still included a tiny white border it's not even centered on the pine green background below that is a stripe which reveals the title of my video imprinted in yellow text and again not centered the kerning of the letters is a disaster is difficult to tell what counts as a space causing the title to feel cluttered and unsettling further down is the main attraction an image of a witch alongside yet another title loudly proclaiming that this book is indeed about the witch there are various witch-related items scattered about this image in isolation is surprisingly high quality compared to the rest of the cover notice the use of symmetric parallelism the slight curvature of the text the subtle gradient and the background that adds just enough interest this part of the cover is well done and very nice yet as we look closer the image seems to be a bit stretched something fishy is going on here a brief google search alerts us that this image is actually the thumbnail of a different youtube video how the witch was made by or pros sure enough whoever made this cover dragged it over and stretched it out for our second copyright violation to top it off the elements of this cover are surrounded by a large purple border but it's a different color of purple than the title background both of which are different than the gradient of the second title that's not to mention the green secondary background and the different green witch background oh and the title is made from two different yellows these are feeble attempts to add some unity to the cover a pathetically ineffectual move now i am no graphic designer but i don't have to be one to see that this covers a complete abomination yeah the copyright infringement is bad but somehow the repulsive design is almost worse whoever created this should be mortified by how insultingly nasty it is speaking of blatant copyright infringement let's take a look inside shall we the text is clearly from my witch video you can read along if you watch it but this text has some serious grammatical deficiencies namely the lack of punctuation bizarrely about a third of the way through the punctuation magically reappears why who knows the text also has slight errors things that don't make sense for example when my video says illidger the book says villager something that would surely be confusing when half the book is about how the witch was outcast from the villagers the witch would occasionally come into contact with the illagers who were similarly outcasts however the illagers were much more aggressive towards villagers conducting patrols and raids they welcomed the witch to participate in such activities whenever she wanted and although the witch didn't want to hurt the villagers herself she secretly found some joy in watching them suffer so she came to some raids healing the illagers but never actually attacking the villagers perhaps it was a way for her to show how she could have been useful if only the villagers had given her a chance it appears obvious that the text was taken from a speech to text generator and plopped in with little editing their interspersed pictures from the video as well the screen grabs do align with the text again though there was no proofreader as some images are from strange moments such as the middle of a fade transition or a diagram before all the parts are listed furthermore many of them are extremely dark something that doesn't always translate well to a printed picture this is likely the work of an automated program a deeper analysis reveals that these images are taken about every 20 seconds in the video this would explain the unnatural image selection there doesn't seem to be any human interaction here by now you should realize that the physical book is terrible but somehow the kindle version is even worse instead of an all-caps font it uses a normal font which makes the inconsistent capitalization even more unmistakable there's a particular image that is notable on the first page and it's of green wait what why is he here turns out it's an image from one of his hermitcraft videos hermitcraft 7 episode 2 there can only be one that title proves to be bitterly ironic because as it turns out there's a book for that video too and suddenly i started to realize that this is a little bit deeper than just a one-off copy and paste green's rip-off is extremely similar to mine entitled hermitcraft 7 episode 2 there can only be one perfect for minecrafters kids and adults top builder ideas guide but graphic novels it has a similar garish cover but at least this time the warped thumbnail is from the correct video the interior of the book has the same format as mine the author is also similar milton miner floyd seems awfully close to jeffrey miner covington the price is even the same so there's a book for my minecraft video and there's a book for green's minecraft video and a question began to form in my mind how many of these books are out there are there other youtubers who have had their videos stolen so i got to work and i began to compile a list of every single one of these books that i could find in total i was able to find records of 25 similar books thankfully 16 of them had been removed from amazon their existence is recorded on websites such as goodreads and google books these sites have no preview of the text only the cover and some basic information two stuck out as extremely familiar the unnerving secrets of minecrafting illager's deep dive perfect for minecrafters kids and adult top builder ideas guidebook graphic novels and disturbing secrets of the piglens minecraft deep dive perfect for minecrafters kids and adults typical ideas guy but graphic novels this second one used the incorrect thumbnail once again so i've been struck two more times by two more authors this time bonnie miner aland and harrison miner davidson that put my total of bootleg books at three but as it turns out i was one of the lucky ones i tracked down the source video of every book and made a list of them with the original creators there were a total of 12 victims most of them only had one or two stolen videos but grian had a whopping 12 books 13 if you count the extra still frame that's by far the most i was in second place with three the original creators are pretty big but there are some small ones too there isn't a clear reason why these particular videos were chosen besides their connection to minecraft with all the books in a list i was able to find some patterns every single one had the same subtitle perfect for minecrafters kids and adults typical ideas guide by graphic novels this is obviously designed to get search engine hits for people looking for legitimate books strangely most instances of the word minecraft are replaced with minecrafting furthermore almost every book had an author of the format first name minor last name although there were a couple whose middle name was fort they were also all added to amazon in march or april of 2021 it seems likely that one person or group was behind all of these and they just generated pseudonyms i wanted to see if i could find any more information about who this person was i had a suspicion that these books were being printed by amazon themselves there's a program called kindle direct publishing which allows authors to easily self-publish through amazon instead of needing to find an official publisher amazon will essentially serve as the printer and distributor for them my physical book seemed to indicate that this was the case the trim size listed on amazon matched one of the options for a kindle direct published book so too did the matte finish of the cover finally on the last page of the book was a small block of text that said made in the usa las vegas nevada january 30th 2022 that was my date of purchase and it turns out that there is indeed a massive amazon fulfillment services warehouse in las vegas so it seems pretty likely that the author was abusing kindle direct publishing it's a clever front since kdp authors are allowed to use pseudonyms it makes it very difficult to figure out who the true author is my next thought was to look at the isbn this stands for international standard book number and it's a unique identifier for all published books ebooks don't need isbns but amazon requires that all books printed through kindle direct publishing must have one if none is provided they'll automatically register the isbn with bowker which is an american registration company looking up the isbn leads to an address in north charleston south carolina united states but this once again is an amazon building which all but confirms that kindle direct publishing was used curiously no other isbn database appears to have this number worldcat open library isbndb and several other sites all return nothing from the looks of it this isbn is only connected to the publisher and while bowker is aware of it and presumably wouldn't assign another book with this isbn it has no record elsewhere so what else some of the ebooks have a strange interjection in the middle of the book with an advertisement to sign up for a mailing list to get a free monthly ebook but despite my sign up i've yet to receive my free ebook and why would you do that when you could just subscribe to me and get a legitimate video about twice a month also for free [Music] unfortunately this seems to be about as far as i can get on this there are a couple of random things i did want to mention though first i wanted to know how much money these fraudulent books were making kindle direct has a royalty calculator and for a 10 price tag the take-home revenue is about 250 to 350 per book depending on the number of pages it's difficult to know how many of these have been sold but it does seem likely that it's not zero the books that remain on amazon have about 20 reviews which is thankfully a low number while these could be fake some of them do appear to be real such as this review by alison s surely there were people who didn't know any better and bought them for their kids or kids themselves who bought them however even if some purchases were made the numbers do appear to be relatively low so that is a positive the other good news is that about two-thirds of the books i was able to find have been removed from amazon i shouldn't even need to mention it but copyright infringement is clearly disallowed in the kindle direct publishing terms of service i've submitted a claim to amazon about this book and hopefully by the time you see this video it will have been taken down i encourage any other creators whose work is stolen to file a similar claim we need to use whatever avenues are available to shut this down in some ways this is a very clever scam it appears to be mostly automated but there are a few clues that suggest that despite the clear jank an actual human looked at these books before publishing them for example some texts intentionally wait to start until after the youtubers introduce themselves they also cut off before they say goodbye in the outro this suggests a hint of humanity to these things it's unfortunate that the intent was to reduce the chances of getting caught but that didn't work time is up your scam is exposed i debated with myself about if i should even make this video and i ultimately decided that i should since i wanted people to be aware of this i want to reiterate please do not buy these books i purchased one in the hopes that it would help me cut the head off the snake but i was disgusted with myself for giving money to these slimy people the scammers who make books like this are near the bottom of the barrel those who have nothing to contribute to the world and instead decide to steal the hard work of others for their own personal benefit yeah for most of us we look at these books and laugh but anyone can get fooled my hope is that this video increases awareness of this problem so that the original creators can file a claim and get this shut down for good anyways we'll start wrapping things up this was a bit of a different kind of video than what i normally do but i think it was an important one to make this was another project that was heavily influenced by the rg and discord server after all they're the ones who helped alert me to this issue and they also discovered some other examples from different creators if you're interested feel free to join the community it's a great place once again as tempting as it may be please don't buy these books even as a novelty if you have any more information about who's behind this let me know don't harass them i just want this to change i'm not mad at the people who've made these books just very very disappointed we'll go ahead and end with that this has been rgn thanks so much for watching and i'll see you all in the next video have a great day you

Channel: RetroGamingNow

Views: 1,268,581

Keywords: Retro, Gaming, Now, RetroGamingNow, RGN, Let's, Play

Id: JypgASKSRZc

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/TransposingJons]

17 hours later, and still.....