A cut-and-paste job or cut and paste approach is a pejorative reference to various kinds of work produced by "cut and paste", i.e., a quick combination of pieces of text collected from various sources, a compilation.
In application to book writing, cut and paste job implies little creativity, no original research and no new insights. It is often assumed that these books are produced by journalists rather than experts in the subject.
Cut and paste jobs often have a partisan agenda and present only facts in support of a certain thesis.
While the phrase "cut and paste" today is associated with computer user interface, the phrase predates the computers. For example, a 1969 book The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller: A Biography by Joseph Jay Deiss says: "It was a cut-and-paste job, with the scissors acting as censor's shears. Suspect material was deleted - whole sections snipped from letters"