Try to think of the most prolific author you know and your mind will probably turn to one of those writers of thick adventure paperbacks who cannot be prevented, even by death, from producing a new action-packed blockbuster every holiday season.

Even the most productive of them would be outstripped, though, by Philip M. Parker. Through his own print-on-demand imprint Icon Group International he currently has 200,000 books currently available on Amazon.com. By contrast that shy creature Anonymous has a paltry 12,133 titles listed over a much longer career.

Parker’s creative fecundity can be ascribed, at least in part, to a reliance on computer programmes to generate a substantial part of his literary output. As he explains in an interview with the New York Times, he sees himself as “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands” in the same way that Henry Ford pioneered the mass-production of the automobile. “Every single step we could think of” he says “we automated.”

Sales are rarely in excess of a few hundred copies per title but print-on-demand means that Parker has no great warehouse of dead inventory waiting for a reader. The books exist only on computer disk until an order has been placed.

Most of the titles so far are textbooks generated by scripts searching the Internet for information on the subject, but plans are already in hand for a series of romance novels and volumes of poetry.

Given the growing scope of the Google Book Search project, which reads books and uploads them to the Internet, it’s now possible to foresee a literary future in which human intervention is no longer required.

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