Hi all,
Huge libraries (large / U.S. Ivy League universities' libraries, public libraries in world-class cities, Library of Congress, etc.) spend unbelievable amounts of money on buying books and magazines every year. Books and magazines are great, but there are certain subjects with no relevant books or magazine articles available. Example: TV. For any popular TV show, Wikipedia has a main article and numerous subarticles on characters, episodes, and so on. For some subjects, Wikipedia is truly the best choice for information.
I propose we band together and start a WikiPrint service. We could somehow make it easy for schools, corporations and libraries to print out subsets of Wikipedia: e.g. if they want a PDF of a whole category to send to an online print-on-demand shop, we compile the PDF for them, add a nice cover page etc., and send it to the shop for them if they like. They would pay us for the service.
I am not sure if this would be a for-profit service or a free service (e.g. part of the WikiPress system). For-profit would mean we would be able to promote ourselves more and we would be more motivated to do well.
Would this be a useful / popular service? What kinds of customers would come to us? For example, a question for you librarians among us: would libraries be interested in such a service?
Jason Spiro Computer programming student and Wikipedian Toronto, Canada