Social media was abuzz after a netizen went on to rant about a new book because it was a hard read, despite the fact that it was written by a prolific author.
Ever since the tweet went viral, another netizen found out that certain paragraphs from the book was plagiarised directly from online articles without any credits given.
Before the revelation, one Twitter user, who goes by the handle @dieyanayuni, made a long Twitter thread on how she “felt like cussing on every page” while reading the book she borrowed from the library. She accompanied her claims with pictures of the book’s questionable content, proving that she wasn’t crying wolf.
The book was filled with outright mistakes and she believed that certain sentences from the book were “copy-pasted” directly from Google Translate. According to her tweet, the worst mistake was that there were three pages repeating the same paragraph continuously – with the sentences awkwardly phrased.
Not long after her thread went viral, another user took it to his Twitter, @WehNakBacaApaNi, revealing that he had found the articles where the author had plagiarised from. One of the websites where the text was copied from is WikiHow, which is famously known for its how-to-guides.
By comparing the texts from the book and the sites where it was allegedly copied from, the similarities are indubitable. When we take a look at it ourselves, it does seem like the texts were directly translated to Bahasa Malaysia to be published in the book.
Normally, book publications would have editors to check the content of the book before publishing it. However, this book was self-published, which explains how it got into the market.
According to a local portal, the author threatened to pursue legal action against the owner of the previous thread for defaming him and his works. Nevertheless, she insisted that she had the right to criticise the author as a reader. She also added, no credit was given to the original websites nor was there any reference list.
If the claims are true, this author has definitely run out of luck as the viral Twitter thread also shows another book of his that also had texts copied from websites.
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