Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Fwd: BBC "5 Live Investigates"

Books, LLC. respond. They say they included Wikipedia URLs on their pages, but Amazon removed them. - d. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andrew <andrew(a)booksllc.net> Date: 1 February 2011 23:29 Subject: BBC "5 Live Investigates" To: dgerard(a)gmail.com, slimvirgin(a)gmail.com, geniice(a)gmail.com, thewub.wiki(a)gmail.com Hi David Gerard, I totally understand your concern about Wikipedia getting proper credit on wiki books! And I understand how annoying it is when that doesn’t happen. What Charlotte was investigating, as I understand it, was why Amazon in the UK had dropped the wiki book descriptions we (Books LLC) provide them with. Those descriptions credit Wikipedia as the source, include an excerpt of one of the Wikipedia articles, a URL to read the full article at Wikipedia, and the titles of other Wikipedia articles in the book (space permitting). The book itself credits Wikipedia on the publisher’s page, the introduction and at the end of every article. I agree with you that readers have a right to that information. Hopefully, with our continued pleading Amazon UK will provide it. While Amazon didn’t explained why they dropped the Wikipedia credits, they did say that they don’t allow URLs in book descriptions. I guess they don’t want their customers leaving Amazon and going to Wikipedia. If you have any questions or suggestions, please do let me know. I will be happy to help in anyway I can. Kind Regards, Andrew Williams Public Relations Manager Books LLC BBC "5 Live Investigates" on Books LLC, Sunday night 9pm UTC Remove Highlighting ________________________________________ [.To WMUK-l for local interest, and foundation-l as the issue's been discussed there at length.] Just spoke to a researcher, Charlotte something, for BBC 5 Live Investigates, Sunday 9pm, this item likely to go out 9:45pm or so. This was just for her research, it wasn't a recorded piece. The piece is on Books LLC and similar operations, which sell reprints of Wikipedia articles as books on Amazon. She was after the Wikipedian viewpoint. I said that it's entirely legal - that you can use our stuff without permission, even commercially, and we like that - "Please, use our stuff!" - you just have to give credit and let other people reuse your version: "share and share alike." So the only issue is that it isn't clear enough these books are just Wikipedia reprints. For us, the annoyance - I said that "annoyance" is probably the word - is when a Wikipedian finds one of these books, goes "aha, a source!", buys it and ... discovers it's just reprints of stuff they have. "While trademark is an issue, we'd like them or Amazon to make it a *bit* clearer that these texts are Wikipedia reprints." She wasn't clear on the business model. I said these are print-on-demand books, where *no* copies exist until someone orders one, at which point a single copy is printed and sent. POD is *very good* these days - you can send a PDF to a machine, and the machine will produce an *absolutely beautiful* perfect-bound book for you, which previously would have been quite pricey. This is enough for them to have a tiny, tiny niche. I also pointed out that anyone can make their own PDFs of Wikipedia articles and some of the projects have partnerships with outside companies to do nice printed books of Wikipedia reprints. But in such cases, everyone is very clear on what they're getting: a nice printed physical copy of content they already have for free on the web. I tried to answer very descriptively, as I can't speak *for* 160,000 people, but there's been enough foundation-l and related discussion to get an idea of what people think. My apologies if I missed bits, this was off the top of my head without referring to nuances of discussion :-) - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l [at] lists Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org