The ledger proves the ISBNs are stolen. This page proves something more damning: the books themselves are assembled from other people's work. We took the catalog records apart line by line and matched every ingredient against the open web — OpenLibrary, archive.org, publisher pages, Google Books. The catalog's own summary paragraphs are lifted verbatim from real books by real publishers. The titles are remixes of real titles and subtitles. The authors are either nobody (no trace in any catalog, anywhere) or somebody — a real, notable person who never wrote the book under their name.
Three specimens below, each carrying two physical copies bought with public money on 13 April 2024, now shelved in the Reference section on the third floor of the Anna Centenary Library, Chennai. Every quoted string on this page can be checked by pasting it into a search box.
| Title | An Era of Divorce |
| Author | Ainsworth, Wittig |
| Imprint | Phoenix 2023 [USA] · 257p. 23 cm · English |
| ISBN | 978-93-9236-004-6 — registry assigns it to Conceptual Framework of Education-1 (Vivek Malviya, Hindi, registered 23/09/2021) |
| Acquisition | 2 copies · accessions 677068, 677069 · 13.04.2024 · Reference, 3rd floor |
The catalog's summary, quoted in full:
"The widening gap between the rich and the poor is turning the American dream into an impossibility for many, particularly children and families. And as the children of low-income families grow to adulthood, they have less access to opportunities and resources than their higher-income peers—and increasing odds of repeating the experiences of their parents. Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality probes the complex relations between social inequality and child development and examines possibilities for disrupting these ongoing patterns."
The title — "An Era of Divorce" is a phrase-fragment of the real book's subtitle world (Families in an Era of…). No book with this exact title exists on OpenLibrary, Google Books or the web. The author — "Wittig Ainsworth" is no traceable author anywhere; the surname pair points at two real figures in the very subject the DDC class number (306.89, divorce) claims: Monique Wittig (novelist-theorist) and Mary Ainsworth (attachment psychologist). Two notables' names, zero of their work. Status: blurb lift confirmed (byte-identical strings); author mash inferred — no person of that name exists, both referents are real.
| Title | Democracy and Peoples Right in The Contemporary World |
| Author | Dreze, Jean |
| Imprint | Phoenix 2023 [USA] · English |
| ISBN | 978-93-9236-009-1 — registry assigns it to Kaaryaalayee Hindee Aur Kampyootar ("Office Hindi and Computer", Vivek Malviya, Hindi, registered 15/02/2022) |
| Acquisition | 2 copies · accessions 677168, 677169 · 13.04.2024 · Reference, 3rd floor |
The catalog's summary, quoted in full:
"Chomsky's early insights into the workings of power in the modern world remain timely and compelling. Published for the first time, this series of lectures also provides the reader with an invaluable introduction to the essential ideas of one of the leading thinkers of our time"
This is the cruelest of the three. The fake book borrows the name of Jean Drèze — the development economist, long-time co-author of Amartya Sen — who is not some random famous name here: he is the real editor and interviewer of the very book the blurb was stolen from. The title is a mash of that book's chapter headings ("The Vicissitudes of Democracy", "Militarism, Democracy and People's Right to Information", "The Nationality Question in the Contemporary World"). The summary still says "Chomsky's". The actual object on the shelf is none of it. Status: blurb lift and chapter-mash confirmed (strings match the OBP page); "Drèze never wrote this" confirmed by absence from his bibliography.
| Title | A Single Woman |
| Author | Naomi, Jane |
| Imprint | Phoenix c2023 · English |
| ISBN | 978-93-9236-021-3 — registry assigns it to Banjar Ke Rookh (Vivek Malviya, Hindi, registered 22/12/2021) |
| Acquisition | 2 copies · accessions 677184, 677185 · 13.04.2024 · Reference, 3rd floor |
The catalog's summary, quoted in full:
"Mandy Hale, also known by her many blog readers and Twitter fans as The Single Woman™, shares her stories, advice, and enthusiasm for living life as an empowered, confident, God-centered woman who doesn’t just resign herself to being single—she enjoys it! Being single has had its stigmas, but Mandy proves it has its advantages too, and she uses wisdom and wit to inspire her fellow single ladies to celebrate and live fully in the life God has given them."
A book about "The Single Woman™" — trademark in the blurb, God-centered and Twitter-fans and all — shelved as the work of a nonexistent "Jane Naomi" under a stolen Hindi-textbook ISBN, in a government library's Reference section. An exact-title real book does exist (A Single Woman, Jeanmarie Simpson Bishop, 2016 — the Jeannette Rankin play), and is unrelated to everything else in this record. Status: blurb lift confirmed; author fabrication confirmed by absence (no traceable "Jane Naomi" author, only unrelated namesakes).
On 07–08 November 2026 we ran a fabrication screen over 293 records of the 569-record ledger: 270 Kalaignar Centenary Library (Madurai) records by author identity, and the 23-record Anna Centenary Library deep-sample by title, author and blurb. Every check used open catalogs and the open web; every evidence URL is in the ledger.
Among the 70 borrowed names: B. R. Ambedkar appears as the author of 19 different Madurai records — including a "20 volumes of Writings and Speeches" set logged as separate fake entries — and the blurb-lifting habit extends across the sample (one record's summary still advertises Noam Chomsky; another lifts a 2019 open-access chapter's abstract). The full row-by-row verdicts, with evidence URLs for each, are in the ledger (fabrication columns) and the repo data files.
Honest limits: the screen classifies catalog records, not physical objects — the shelf-inspection, print-quality and bill-chain questions are for DVAC, which holds the complaint. "No trace" means no record in OpenLibrary, WorldCat, Google Books or the open web, as of the screen date; it cannot prove a self-published book nobody ever cataloged, which is why specimen verdicts also rest on the positive matches (the verbatim blurbs, the registry originals).
One hundred and fifty records in the screen carry an author who traces to no publication, no biography, no person — names minted for a copyright page. The five below are drawn from the screen's actual verdicts. Everything factual around each voice — biblio number, title, ISBN, shelf — is from the ledger. The voices are fiction, written by this desk: that is the point. A ghost is the only narrator a ghostwritten book honestly has.
Fictional testimony, clearly so. These five names come from the fabrication screen's no-trace verdicts — no real person answers to them, which is why they can speak here without defaming anyone. The ghosts who were instead real people — Ambedkar on nineteen Madurai records, Drèze in a Chennai record, the real writer whose voice survives inside a stranger's summary — get no invented quotes, because their names were taken, not minted. Their evidence speaks for them: see the three specimens above.
Five ghost authors from the fabrication screen were asked to testify — clearly-labelled fiction, grounded in checkable ledger rows. They now live on their own page, where they are joined by the one real author the scam borrowed: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whose twenty volumes in the Madurai ledger carry no ISBN and a ₹0 price — quoted in his own words, with sources, never in ours.