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

Wed Jul 12 21:06:37 UTC 2006

Volker Haas wrote:

>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. 
>  
>
I am curious how you plan to compile these books in a format that looks 
good on paper and not strictly as a web format.  While this can be 
automated to an extent, I do think there are some issues that come from 
trying to move content from a web format to a printed page, and not all 
of these can be completely automated.  As I havn't been able to preview 
a book yet,

>
>* 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.
>  
>
While notifying the Wikimedia Foundation board may be demonstrating good 
faith, I want to emphasis that it is not necessary to seek permission in 
order to republish Wikimedia project content.  The GFDL spells out the 
terms and conditions quite clearly and in theory should be sufficient 
for non-lawyers to get into print versions of Wikimedia content.

This does get back to the point in question that I raised with my first 
posting about print versions of Wikimedia content.  What should 
reasonable project guidelines be for links to print versions like this? 
 As I've pointed out, this is but the beginning of a huge number of 
request that will be coming for services like this, and telling 
everybody to get their own legal counsel and duke it out in the 
courtroom is not going to be a pleasant experience for anybody.  

Not permitting any links to services like this might be a solution, and 
encouraging independent advertising of these services outside of 
Wikimedia projects as the only real advertising venue.  

There is, however, some value for individuals who want to purchase print 
versions and it would be logical to offer some links to printed 
versions.  This would be a service to our "readers" that may want to get 
some added value to Wikimedia projects.  Some sort of standard should be 
applied *if* we permit some external links, even if of the variety like 
the ISBN links to on-line booksellers.  That we do offer links to 
commercial services on Wikimedia projects already for books should 
demonstrate at least some sort of precedence to permit reprint links as 
well, as long as they are just as descrete and don't clutter up the 
article/project pages.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning