[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Mohamed Magdy]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:
> Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy
> PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is
> associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did
> this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is
> released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with
> Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our
> competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print
> publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no
> idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot
> would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the
> context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the
> current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people
> who order printed books?
>
Well, you first need to check if it would be/is generating enough
revenue that justifies the investment.  and see the usage of the
collection extension and how many books they already printed etc.  I
don't know what is wrong with charging money to print the books, if
someone needs a hardcopy of an article collection, then WMF should be
the one providing it, if feasible.

user:alnokta