[Foundation-l] Printed on Demand Books from Wikipedia articles

Wed Jul 12 15:06:12 UTC 2006

Hi everybody,

as the title suggests I would like to introduce a website to the 
wikimedia community that offers books consisting of wikipedia articles 
that areprinted on demand. The unique feature is that every user can 
individually pick arbitrary articles from the wikipedia (currently only 
from the english version) and add them to his book. Once the user is 
satisfied with the book's content, he can download a pdf-preview and 
check how the book will look like when printed. The last step is to 
order the book and get a unique encyclopedia containing only selected 
wikipedia articles.

The service is located at http://www.pediapress.com and has not yet been 
publicly announced.

I would like to know the opinion of the wikimedia community about this 
service, since I am aware of the fact that a couple of copyright and 
also "moral" issues are related to selling wikipedia content.

Some of these issues are pointed out in the thread "Offering Wikibooks 
content for sale" 
(http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/63024).

I would like to give you some details about our efforts to comply with 
the GFDL and also the spirit of the wikipedia content and community:

* on the pediapress.com website and in the printed books it is clearly 
stated that all articles have their origin in the wikipedia project

* below each article a link (in case of the book the plain URL) to the 
original wikipedia article is shown

* all principle authors are listed below an article in the book if possible

* pediapress does not generate any unnecessary traffic on wikipedia 
since we use the wikipedia dumps

* we e-mailed with Angela Beesley (member of the Board of Trustees of 
the Wikimedia Foundation) and Brad Patrick (general counsel to  the 
Wikimedia Foundation) who did not see anything problematic with our service

Last but not least I want to point out that the pediapress affiliate 
program has the goal to generate donations to the wikimedia foundation: 
after ordering a book, users have the option to publish and promote 
their book. Thereby others are able to buy the published book. The 
publisher receives a provision of 10% of the books price which he can 
donate to the wikimedia foundation.Please note that pediapress is still 
in a "beta" phase even though compiling, printing and ordering books is 
perfectly possible. But since all processing and layouting is done 
automatically there are still some shortcomings that will be fixed asap.

I don't want to deny that my company (brainbot technologies AG - 
http://brainbot.com) and I hope that pediapress supports itself 
financially. The main motivation nevertheless was to give something back 
to the wikipedia community. Since me and my colleagues aren't exactly 
good writers but heavy consumers of the wikipedia, we thought it would 
be a better idea to try to promote the offline usage of the wikipedia by 
building pediapress.

Thanks for your patience - I hope some of you check out pediapress and 
post their opinions.

Volker Haas