Born dyslexic, Parker early on developed a passion for dictionaries. He gained undergraduate degrees in mathematics, biology and economics. He received a Ph.D. in Business Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has Masters degrees in Finance and Banking (University of Aix-Marseille) and Managerial Economics (Wharton).He was a senior consultant at EMCI, and an economist for Nathan Associates in Washington, DC, before moving to INSEAD.

Books on economics

As well as co-authoring some technical economic articles, Parker has written six books on national economic development and economic divergence. These insist that consumer utility and consumption functions must be bounded by physical laws, against economic axioms which violate laws of physics such as conservation of energy.

• Climatic Effects on Individual, Social and Economic Behavior, Greenwood Press, 1995
• Cross-Cultural Statistical Encyclopedia of the World, Greenwood Press, 1997. A four-volume encyclopedia, which recasts international national economic statistics of the world into linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups.
• Physioeconomics: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth. MIT Press, 2000. This forecasts global economic and demographic trends to the year 2100: he concludes that long-run economic convergence between different cultural groups is unlikely.

Online dictionary

Parker is also involved - as entrepreneur publisher and editor - in new media reference work projects. He is the instigator of Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition, a multilingual online dictionary created in 1999 and using the "Webster's" name, now in the public domain. This site compiles different online dictionaries and encyclopedia including the Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary , the Wiktionary and Wikipedia.

Automatically-generated books

Most of Parker's automatically-generated books target niche markets (the Long Tail). Examples include:

• books series on medical subjects published by ICON Health Publications and coauthored with James N. Parker. The Official Patient's Sourcebook series deals with classic diseases like spinal stenosis or autoimmune hepatitis. The 3-in-1 Medical Reference series deals with general medical topics like hemoglobin.
• a series on the future demand for certain products in certain regions in the world, largely consisting of tables and graphs, published by his company ICON Group International, Inc. One book, The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, won the 2008 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.
• a series on cross-language crossword puzzle books, e.g. Webster's English to Italian Crossword Puzzles: Level 1, and thesauri, e.g. Webster's Quechua - English Thesaurus Dictionary published by ICON Group International, Inc. Some of these titles raised concerns with linguists who claimed inaccuracies and ownership/citation rights in certain languages covered in these volumes. Parker removed the concerned titles from print stating that he had not known that anyone claimed intellectual rights over languages.
• a series of quotation collections subtitled Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases, each volume assembling quotations which feature a specific English word. Excerpts are drawn from public domain literary sources and reference works, and from Wikipedia articles (identified as "WP" after a quotation).

All books are self-published paperbacks. Ninety-five percent of the ordered books are sent out electronically; the rest are print on demand.

Parker's programs can also produce rudimentary poetry as well as scripts for animated game shows intended to teach English to non-native speakers and available on YouTube. He plans to extend the programs to produce romance novels.

Sources

Sources for the content of some books are electronic data bases. These sources are cited in the published works.