KULA2 - "The unwise uneasy undue undoes the unfair uncles," might be a sentence that Hemingway or Faulkner meant to write, but they certainly never published it. That same sentence however, has been published. It was written by bots at the brand new Literature Factory in Second Life.

For those that take their literature seriously, the note card handed out to visitors by Rosie the Receptionist Bot might be a clue to turn around and go home. The card begins "What is a Literature Factory? Well now, that’s a silly question, it’s simply a factory that makes literature."

This factory is a fine example of vertical product development, as the robots start the process by making words, sorting them into the correct part of speech, assembling them into sentences, then finally scanning them into a giant book which is finally shrunken into a more manageable sized tome. "Now, I have things to do and people to see, so we went ahead and automated the factory," the factory's designer, Ciemaar Flintoff writes in the note card.

Flintoff takes the whole process very much tongue in cheek. "I do believe this is Second Life's first robotic book-writing establishment and obviously this is the beginning of a trend that will ultimately revolutionize the writing industry. While our quality is lower, just look at the speed of automated authorship."

Flintoff is the author of a blog called Channel 3B, and he says he may eventually publish the works of the bots on his blog. For now though, he enjoys the many awards his bots are winning in the rather new category of books written by bots. As he leads a tour through the factory, he passes by a small display of awards and remarks, "You see, we have a Pull-it-sir there, and is that one of Booker's prizes on the top, Sandhya?"