Since picture.com seems to be very popular for their contests I think many members of dA are affected by these unfair practices as well:

Yesterday I received a letter from picture.com saying that the image I submitted for their photo contest has been selected as a semi-final winner and will proceed to the finals. Sounds good so far, doesn't it? But it comes even better: The letter also read that I could get my image published in a coffee-table photo book if I just sign the artist's proof and send it back to the picture.com office. And here is where the scam begins.

According to the letter the book's working title was "Endless Journeys" and would probably be published in Winter 2008. They even provided the ISBN and a brochure about the book. The price of the book would be $89.95 but I could get a discount of $20 if I pre-ordered it (for $25 it is also possible to have your artist's profile included in the book).

Now that sounds a bit fishy because usually if you contribute to a book you will get paid and also get free samples of the book--but in this case it seems to be the other way round. Also, the price for the book is quite high. So I searched for the ISBN on Amazon but couldn't find it. Instead I found a number of forum threads dealing with the same topic, and it seems the publisher ("International Library of Photography") will only publish the book if there are enough pre-orders.

What they do is called "vanity publishing". That means the book will never be sold to the public but only to the contributors themselves. So what you pay for is a book with an uncertain delivery date, uncertain title, no public audience, and with a large number of small low-quality images per page at a ridiculous price. The equation is simple: They include a large number of images to get a large number of orders from naive artists, and they use the photo contests on their website picture.com as a decoy.