[Foundation-l] Rethinking Wikibooks (was Re: PediaPress)

Tue Nov 16 22:14:55 UTC 2010

Hi Robert:

You touched on a lot of interesting topics in that email!  I'll
highlight the ones that most jumped out at me.

> I realize that e-book readers and some other similar things are starting
> to show up on some college campuses, but the physical book is still very
> much common even in this setting.  Unfortunately, I can't point to much
> in the way of Wikimedia content on college campuses and in fact there is
> a visceral hatred for Wikipedia and anything associated with it with
> many professors.

I know that here at The Open University there is a lot of interest in
that sort of gadget.  They haven't really been deployed widely yet,
and if they are, there may very well not be much or any
"university-sponsored"  Wiki* material on them -- but I'm nearly
certain that if the devices have web browsers, there will be a lot of
Wikipedia traffic coming from them :).  Presumably including a lot of
edits (including, hopefully, a lot of constructive ones...).

> The important thing to point out here, however, is that there was some
> extra motivation to participate when there is something tangible at the
> end of the process.

I love books.  A couple times, I had a go at turning PlanetMath into a
book, and we got reasonably far, e.g. here is a 36MB PDF file with the
whole dog-gone encyclopedia in it (as it looked in 2005) --
http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/book.pdf.  I haven't ever printed it,
but I printed out the previous version in a 2-up double-sided format,
and it was about the size of your average telephone book (like for a
city with a quarter million people or so!).  But perhaps not as
useful.

My point, I guess, is that as much as I like books, the mere
possibility of having something *tangible* in your hands isn't really
enough.  The main thing is that the book has to be *good*, which means
variously: concise, informative, timely, well-illustrated,
inexpensive, reputable, engaging, etc., etc. -- different books for
different schnooks(?), or something like that.

So a mechanism for turning Wikipedia content into printed books isn't
enough, either.  I'd argue that even a mechanism for turning Wikipedia
content into "beautifully typeset" books isn't enough.  (Vide the
fairly low sales figures quoted for Pediapress.)  To be sure, it is
(or, it would be) very good to *have* that ability.

What is needed in addition to a complete and working "toolchain" is
one or more complete and working "workflows".  There are SO many ways
in which such a workflow could feed back positively for an associated
encyclopedia project like Wikipedia or PlanetMath.   This is true both
for books rendered in ink and those that are rendered in e-ink.

You raised a really interesting idea with this question:

> Would the WMF even be willing to help
> coordinate funds raised for the physical printing of books, presuming
> that they would be given to a school (like some Wikibooks being sent to
> Kenya or even printed there to help stock school libraries)?

Not only is that itself totally awesome,

(1) it illustrates very nicely why WMF should produce a complete open
source toolchain that does what Pediapress currently does
*post-haste*); and

(2) it suggests that there *could be* an entire set of monetizable
services that would fit into the book-production workflow.  It would
be good to look for more when sketching out the workflow as a whole.

(3) Combining this idea with your thought above, is there a reasonably
place in the Wiki World for working out business models and
strategies?  Wikiversity *might* function in that way (since such a
project would, after all, be very educational).  But maybe it's not
the best place.  In any case, I think it would be good to find a good
place to work more on this.  I would be happy to participate in that
effort.

Joe

Oh, and, PS.  We should definitely be thinking about replacing other
books, not generating a whole new market for books -- or else we'll
cause a huge geological deforestation event!  Or maybe Earth is
already deforested enough.  In any case, to paraphrase William
Burroughs, we should be making books for the Space Age!